Beautiful Anarchy Article Index

This rant has been a long time coming. I promise that we’ll be back to regular programming soon. For now, please consider: It took two weeks in Mexico, away from the daily grind in the US, to gain full consciousness about how insufferable and hateful American culture has become. Here I was in beautiful Mexico, experiencing daily life in both resorts and cities, eating glorious and healthy food, enjoying the lovely hospitality of the people, participating in a vibrant commercial life, seeing how people delight in the daily task of living, growing, making life better each day. I saw smiles…

There’s so much talk about the terrible features of our new political times. I’ve written plenty. I wrote an entire book about the rise of right-wing collectivism and how it poses special dangers for human liberty. Trump rode this very wave into office. That is his orientation. Or maybe it was his marketing plan for electoral victory. After one year, we are not seeing much in the way of real protectionism (beyond the normal), no real crackdown on weed, no greater centralization of executive power beyond what was there. He faced such a huge backlash on his immigration ban that…

The classic criticism against the gold standard is that it was too costly. Why are these guys wasting resources to suit up, dig into mountains, desperately seeking a finite resource, and slogging the results all the way to Treasury Department? There is a reason that Bitcoin is being called Digital Gold. This is all just silly. We know how to make money: you print it. It’s far cheaper to print than mine. A paper standard will save a tremendous amount of resources that can go to other purposes. There is a plausibility to the claim. We do know how to…

Some people on the left are starting to worry about getting trolled by the alt-right. This is because the alt-right has become aggressively anti-capitalist, pro-welfare state, and in favor of a government that specifically promotes white interests, not a free market that offers no privilege to anyone. “The alt-right is looking to expand its ranks,” declares Salon, “and prominent leaders of the notorious white supremacist movement apparently believe that leftists are an ideal target for their recruiting efforts.” This follows a huge investigative piece that appeared in The Nation, in which a reporter from the publication attended a number of…

A century ago, having electric indoor lighting was a luxury of the rich. It was a dangerous technology at the time – one thing goes wrong and the whole house is up in flames – but people took the risk. 150,000 years of lighting rooms with wax and oil was just too much. The future would be about glass bulbs and electric filaments. If you were rich and believed in the future, you had your home wired. If we did not learn to dominate nature, our existence on earth would be short-lived or constantly threatened by beasts, pests, and weather. What happened to…

Jeffrey A. Tucker, who is the Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), has published the book Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty in September. Last week, Kai Weiss talked with him via Skype about the book and the threat of right-collectivism. ___________________________________________________________________ Kai Weiss: Let’s start off with an easy question. What was the purpose of writing this book? Why was it important right now to take a closer look at the right-collectivist movement? It’s another way to control people, it’s another cultural model for managing society from the top-down. Jeffrey Tucker: Right collectivism is on the rise around the world, both…

Now that the special election is over, the mainstream press can stop reporting on Alabama as if it were Mars. Have some sympathy with the voters in this state, please. Not for the first time, a populist demagogue snagged the Republican nomination. His opponent had all the predictable views of the Democrats, which is to say similarly attached to an old-world model of political control. Those who held their nose and voted for the Republican didn’t like his antics or views; they simply observed that once these people take office, they aren’t even real people with much decision-making power. They…

The opportunity is to live every dream you have ever had. Now. The problem is that for every dream you realize, you have to relinquish some of your property. And every bit of that property is hard to come by, extraordinarily lucrative, and the single most in-demand thing on the planet earth. Among the crypto rich, it’s hip to be poor. You must be tight. Stingy. No signs of wealth. So, yes, you could be living it up. Instead, you have become addicted to seeing your net worth rise and rise…oh, and rise further, and further, and rise again. And…

This year has been one of the greatest of my life, full of amazing changes that point to a bright future for all the things I care about. This year has also made me most grateful for life itself. Two dear friends have recently announced potentially life-threatening diseases, and I suffer to think of their turmoil and pain, and pray for their recovery. Both have been enormously valuable people in my life, and their suffering is my suffering. Also this year, a man who had a profound influence on me – so quiet, so cautious, so tender – passed away,…

After Bitcoin hit $10,000, it, at last, seemed to dawn on the mainstream financial press that this thing matters. There has been a panic rush to catch up on the meaning of it all. Some have doubled down on the claim that the whole thing is a hoax. Others dismiss it as a bubble (indeed, all financial models would suggest that a correction is needed). Some bigshots have called for it to be banned as if it is even possible to ban a mathematical protocol. So much confusion out there! Having followed this technology from 2010, here are the ten…

In Internet slang, they are called the HODLers, the people who are clinging to their Bitcoin and refusing to spend it. Instead, they just refresh their wallet apps, feeling richer by day while deferring consumption. Many of these burgeoning millionaires live like paupers. I’ve met many of them: all over the U.S., in Israel, in Brazil. They believe that every dollar they spend today is two dollars they won’t make in a few months. Probably they are right. There is nothing selfish, strange, or weird about holding an asset that is rising in value. Bitcoin is undergoing a historic deflation,…

Sometimes a commercial appears that both shatters a paradigm and creates a popular meme that truly sticks. The genius is undeniable but extremely hard to manufacture from a formula. It just works. Think of “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” “Where’s the beef?”, “Mikey likes it!”, and “Do you have any Grey Poupon?” All these were huge cultural moments that managed to achieve what advertising is supposed to achieve: brand recognition, pride in consumption, affirmation of cultural identity. We had another one come to us in 2017. It’s Bud Light’s Dilly Dilly commercial that first ran during an…

The Washington Post is outraged. The New York Times even more so. Commentators are going nuts. “Using a tax bill to abolish the individual mandate amounts to a backdoor way of sabotaging Obamacare,” writes John Cassidy. “Republicans, and Donald Trump, have counted on that (as well as your limited outrage bandwidth) in slipping an Affordable Care Act mandate repeal inside their insidious tax bill,” writes Bridget Read. Obamacare’s much-despised individual mandate is, in fact, a tax. It is properly dealt with in a tax bill. All this howling is due to how the GOP-controlled Senate used a tax bill to…

Randal K. Quarles, a Trump administration appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Vice Chair for bank supervision, has given a lengthy speech (“Thoughts on Prudent Innovation in the Payment System”) that directly targets Bitcoin as a danger to the monetary and financial system. To reiterate, an official speaking for the nation’s central bank that manages the global reserve currency – the institution that has long bragged about its power to bail out the entire world with the magic powers of the alchemist – has put down Bitcoin for being untrustworthy, unbacked, and unsound. Discrediting Crypto The timing…

We tend to think of the past as settled. There is nothing we can do to change it. But this is not entirely true. How we think about the past – the good guys and bad guys, the justice and injustice, the causes and effects – has a profound effect on our perceptions of the present. Our understanding comes to be revised based on new information as it comes to light. In this sense, the past is not settled. It is a living reality. Big thoughts, right? They come to me courtesy of an animated film now rocking the theaters. I’ve…

It’s beyond me why the Disney short showing before the new movie Coco (which itself is fantastic) is getting such terrible reviews. It might have something to do with an aspect of Internet culture. Tradition anxiety is prompted by the depth of the history associated with the winter holiday. You can make a bigger splash on social media by brutally criticizing something than by praising it. Then the tipping point arrives and everyone somehow has to agree something is terrible even when it is not (the paradigmatic case of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” comes to mind). In any case, I found…

One of the most exciting books of 2017 is James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale 2017). It deals with all the salient questions (that I care about in any case). In prehistoric times, how did human beings discover how to feed themselves? How did we decide to become settled in one spot rather than move around as hunters and gatherers? And the biggest question: where did the state come and why? Scott is properly seen as a critic of the modern state, if not a full-blown anti-statist radical. The core of Scott’s fascinating…

In a strange blast from the past, the Trump administration has rejected an uncontroversial vertical merger proposed by AT&T and Time Warner. Oh sure, it’s petty. It’s arbitrary and capricious. It’s economically unjustified. The principal players are right to object. Still, it’s nothing new. Antitrust has always been this way, from Standard Oil to Microsoft. It’s always been about power, not economics. Vertical mergers haven’t been controversial in a long time. But this one is different, so far as the Trump administration is concerned. It’s a reminder of the old days when Washington was in freak-out mode about Hollywood’s “studio…

One time, when I was a small child, I saw Hank Aaron go to bat. He had already hit his 500th home run. I was looking forward to seeing this genius do his thing. I was devastated when he struck out. Some genius, I recall thinking. As an eight-year-old, my first thought was that I could have done exactly what he did. Of course, Hank knew something that I, at the time, did not. Genius is about averages, not every time at bat. If every time you strike out, you imagine that you might be a fraud, you will make…

This morning, I was sitting at a stop light and heard a terrifying screeching. A black sedan headed my direction from the oncoming lane was careening across six lanes of traffic, with squealing brakes and tires, through the intersection, flying forward some 75 or so yards and finally landing against a pole with a mighty impact. Terror shot through everyone in the vicinity. Green means go. The problem was that there were cars in the way. What happened? The woman behind the wheel had been driving 45 mph and saw a green light ahead of her. Green means go. The problem was…

At long last, with the end of “net neutrality,” competition could soon come to the industry that delivers Internet services to you. You might be able to pick among a range of packages, some minimalist and some maximalist, depending on how you use the service. Or you could choose a package that charges based only on what you consume, rather than sharing fees with everyone else. Internet socialism is dead; long live market forces. With market-based pricing finally permitted, we could see new entrants to the industry because it might make economic sense for the first time to innovate. The…

As a kid, people were always trying to get me to listen to the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. The adults decided they were good. I wasn’t buying it. To my kid ears, there was just too much happening in them. I had no context to understand them. They seemed long and pompous and had no real way to get where they were coming from or why they existed. Not for me. Not yet. I just listened again to the entire cycle, one through nine. It takes about six and a half hours. I felt transported, each symphony different from…

Almost every small and medium-sized town has what are called farmers markets. We love them. Some are seasonal. Some open only on weekends. People shops under tents and pay vendors cash. It’s all very charming, a nice alternative to superstores. I just returned from one. I came home with a 4-pound Red Snapper, oversized Brussels Sprouts, beautiful red potatoes, fresh cheese made in the Mexican style, and tubs of spices – all for less than half what I would pay at a regular grocery store. Plus I enjoyed looking at foods and ingredients from all over the world. So delightful,…

There he was dropping off packages in the mail room. I picked up mine and walked away. Then I did a double take. The patch on his shoulder was not USPS, FedEx, or UPS. It was the familiar lower case “a” of Amazon. “Wait, do you actually work for Amazon?” “Yes, sir.” “The company that sells things online now has its own warehouse-to-doorstep delivery service?” “Yes, it’s been around for a year, but expanding by the day. I love my job. It’s a great company.” I am pretty sure I knew this, but it was only a news story until…

People were stunned when the Trump administration unilaterally bailed on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty in January 2017. It seemed like a deadly blow to this treaty that would have lowered tariffs among 12 nations. What is downright humiliating for Americans is that the treaty became better only after the US withdrew from it. What did this move portend for the cause of free trade? Some despaired that it would signal a new trend toward protectionism, not only for the US but the world. There is a certain nationalist myopia in this judgment. Americans are inclined to believe that…

If you read on the topic of money’s history from any mainstream textbook, you will already know the drill. In the past, money took many forms. It was shells, pelts, salt, and various metals. Finally we got paper money, credit institutions, then central banks. At this point, we are told, history was complete. The final and best form had arrived. The state would be in charge of money forever. All that was left was to have it managed in a way that better served our needs. People argued about systems of government management. Maybe a rule of some sort, based…

I can’t remember a nuttier weekend in the history of Bitcoin than this one. That’s because the action gets more exciting by the day, with deeper plots, more options, growing complexities, and financial and personal drama all around. You know why? Because this technology matters enormously for the future of the world. It’s Day One in the birth of a new way of doing business. It’s extremely hard to write about this for the uninitiated without seeming to speak Klingon, but here is my attempt. My own Twitter and instant messaging blew up with questions, assertions, declarations, and anathemas. I…

I listened intently to the New York Times’s interview with Steve Bannon, the nationalist man of mystery who might be the most influential force in politics today. He is widely credited with bringing Trump to power with his populist message against the establishments of both parties. His answer keeps coming back to one central principle: economic nationalism. Listening to the interview, the appeal of his message is obvious. There is passion, even fire, in his voice. He is dedicated and focused. By his account, he represents the struggle of the common man against the elites. It’s a battle, a revolution,…

In the old days, people would go on diets to lose weight. People said it was about health, but it was usually about vanity. That’s fine. Then it really did become about health. Everyone I knew claimed to have some allergy to nuts, gluten, or lactose. These days, it seems like everyone has a highly curated diet, not just on grounds of preference and taste but rather tied to essential health needs, even some big spiritual philosophy, always with a big theory to back it. Who can even throw a dinner party anymore? Really you can’t. Who can even throw…

John F. Kelly, White House chief of staff, gave a press conference to address the controversy over Trump’s remarks to a grieving mother of a soldier killed in action. Trump was reported to have been insensitive in saying that the kid “knew what he was getting into.” That remark sounds clumsy, but in content, Kelly said, it underscores the absolute heroism of anyone who signs up with a willingness to give your life for the country. The “serve or die” rule remains in place today, not only in Russia, China, and North Korea but also in the U.S. The powerful…

There are many unexpected features of Tel Aviv–first among them is that it is a normal, happy, peaceful, prosperous city–but I couldn’t wait to write about one in particular. It’s loud. It’s happy. It’s straight out of 1920s. You just have to imagine an older hotel in the center of Tel Aviv. You walk through the lobby and around the corner, opening some tall doors with etched glass. Inside is a relatively small space populated by plush red sofas and tiny tables, so that when the space is full, you feel like you are nuzzled elbow to elbow. The place is…

The idea of having government assist after a natural disaster sounds great. It makes us feel good. Houston floods? Send millions. New Orleans floods? Send hundreds of millions. Puerto Rico? The place is a mess and needs billions and billions. It all seems right. The great truth about government is that every penny it spends must come from somewhere and must land somewhere else. Until you look at the details. Someone gets the money. Whether they are the same institutions who actually do the reconstruction is another matter. And what kind of relief they provide is still another question. Other…

As of this week, New York is finally free to dance! As incredible as it seems, the law that mostly banned dancing in New York clubs and bars has finally fallen, fully 91 years after it first passed. The law that a majority of New York City Council voted to repeal was called The Cabaret Law. Yes, it was heavily enforced since its inception, and increasingly so, especially in the 1980s, as a supposed way of cleaning up the city. The end of the oppression was widely celebrated. The Letter of the Law The law banned any “musical entertainment, singing, dancing…

Lin Farley, the person who coined the phrase “sexual harassment” in 1975, is today deeply unhappy about the movement she started. She thinks it has flopped. “At first,” she writes, “it felt as if the term had the potential to change everything. Working women immediately took up the phrase, which finally captured the sexual coercion they were experiencing daily.” It’s true that by giving the practice a name, she writes, the rules in corporate life and government began to change. Training programs against sexual harassment are common. Women with some degree of professional success, resources, and other options have new…

“To the moon,” goes one popular slogan in Bitcoin circles. “No, I will not set up your Bitcoin wallet,” says another. Couple those and you get a sense of the attitude in the Bitcoin community right now. For eight years now, establishment financial and monetary experts have been putting it down. With prices now at dizzying heights, defying the expectations of even its biggest fans, Bitcoin has entered a new era. Will it suddenly crash again like it did last month? Probably. But no one knows when. And what happens then is the big issue. The whole history of this…

If your profligate friend blew his budget on liquor, you might feel bad for him. But it’s unlikely that you would be willing to fork over money to cover his mistake. He needs to figure it out. And maybe, then, he will learn a lesson for the future. This is exactly how I feel about all this whining about the federal deficit. I didn’t cause it. It’s not my problem. I should not be forced to pay for it. I don’t work every day in order to earn money to pay for other people’s problems. It’s bad citizenship always to…

Wow, the daily news is grim. Civilization is collapsing all around us. Corruption is everywhere. The political parties are falling apart. The president is trashing the office. Americans are hopelessly divided and hating each other. Universities have become centers of contention and control. Russia meddled in an election. What a mess. Right? Here’s the problem. If I weren’t reading this stuff, none of it would affect me in the slightest bit. Consider how we really live. By any standard, life is getting spectacularly great at increasing rates. Here are some examples. Life Is Grand! I was just talking to this…

It only took a few hours after the news of the Texas massacre for the New York Times to start its gun-control incantations again. “Republicans leaders in Congress do nothing,” the paper writes. “Or, really, so far they’ve done the same thing they have always done: offered thoughts and prayers.” But here is a truth. Not every tragedy has a political solution. The shooter in Texas was possessed by an evil longing to cause mass death, and his weapon of choice was a gun. It appears that his desire to kill even more was thwarted by a gun in the…

The rise of the so-called alt-right is the most unexpected ideological development of our time. Most people of the current generation lack a sense of the historical sweep of the intellectual side of the right-wing collectivist position. Jeffrey Tucker, in this collection written between 2015 and 2017, argues that this movement represents the revival of a tradition of interwar collectivist thought that might at first seem like a hybrid but was distinctly mainstream between the two world wars. It is anti-communist but not for the reasons that were conventional during the Cold War, that is, because communism opposed freedom in…

I was honored to be the guest speaker of the Yale University Political Union last week, addressing the need to abolish the welfare state. The structure of the union breaks down students into “parties” based on political ideology. The guest speaks and then the students challenge. This is followed by minor speeches and challenges from students. The entire event lasts two hours, and the guest gets the final word. A word on the students themselves: I was amazed at the erudition, decorum, and adult-like collegiality among them. It seems almost out of some movie I’ve seen, something set in the…

I listened intently to the New York Times’s interview with Steve Bannon, the nationalist man of mystery who might be the most influential force in politics today. He is widely credited with bringing Trump to power with his populist message against the establishments of both parties. His answer keeps coming back to one central principle: economic nationalism. Listening to the interview, the appeal of his message is obvious. There is passion, even fire, in his voice. He is dedicated and focused. By his account, he represents the struggle of the common man against the elites. It’s a battle, a revolution,…

I was honored to be the guest speaker of the Yale University Political Union last week, addressing the need to abolish the welfare state. The structure of the union breaks down students into “parties” based on political ideology. The guest speaks and then the students challenge. This is followed by minor speeches and challenges from students. The entire event lasts two hours, and the guest gets the final word. A word on the students themselves: I was amazed at the erudition, decorum, and adult-like collegiality among them. It seems almost out of some movie I’ve seen, something set in the…

It only took a few hours after the news of the Texas massacre for the New York Times to start its gun-control incantations again. “Republicans leaders in Congress do nothing,” the paper writes. “Or, really, so far they’ve done the same thing they have always done: offered thoughts and prayers.” But here is a truth. Not every tragedy has a political solution. The shooter in Texas was possessed by an evil longing to cause mass death, and his weapon of choice was a gun. It appears that his desire to kill even more was thwarted by a gun in the…

The rise of the so-called alt-right is the most unexpected ideological development of our time. Most people of the current generation lack a sense of the historical sweep of the intellectual side of the right-wing collectivist position. Jeffrey Tucker, in this collection written between 2015 and 2017, argues that this movement represents the revival of a tradition of interwar collectivist thought that might at first seem like a hybrid but was distinctly mainstream between the two world wars. It is anti-communist but not for the reasons that were conventional during the Cold War, that is, because communism opposed freedom in…

Wow, the daily news is grim. Civilization is collapsing all around us. Corruption is everywhere. The political parties are falling apart. The president is trashing the office. Americans are hopelessly divided and hating each other. Universities have become centers of contention and control. Russia meddled in an election. What a mess. Right? Here’s the problem. If I weren’t reading this stuff, none of it would affect me in the slightest bit. Consider how we really live. By any standard, life is getting spectacularly great at increasing rates. Here are some examples. Life Is Grand! I was just talking to this…

If your profligate friend blew his budget on liquor, you might feel bad for him. But it’s unlikely that you would be willing to fork over money to cover his mistake. He needs to figure it out. And maybe, then, he will learn a lesson for the future. This is exactly how I feel about all this whining about the federal deficit. I didn’t cause it. It’s not my problem. I should not be forced to pay for it. I don’t work every day in order to earn money to pay for other people’s problems. It’s bad citizenship always to…

As of this week, New York is finally free to dance! As incredible as it seems, the law that mostly banned dancing in New York clubs and bars has finally fallen, fully 91 years after it first passed. The law that a majority of New York City Council voted to repeal was called The Cabaret Law. Yes, it was heavily enforced since its inception, and increasingly so, especially in the 1980s, as a supposed way of cleaning up the city. The end of the oppression was widely celebrated. The Letter of the Law The law banned any “musical entertainment, singing, dancing…

Lin Farley, the person who coined the phrase “sexual harassment” in 1975, is today deeply unhappy about the movement she started. She thinks it has flopped. “At first,” she writes, “it felt as if the term had the potential to change everything. Working women immediately took up the phrase, which finally captured the sexual coercion they were experiencing daily.” It’s true that by giving the practice a name, she writes, the rules in corporate life and government began to change. Training programs against sexual harassment are common. Women with some degree of professional success, resources, and other options have new…

“To the moon,” goes one popular slogan in Bitcoin circles. “No, I will not set up your Bitcoin wallet,” says another. Couple those and you get a sense of the attitude in the Bitcoin community right now. For eight years now, establishment financial and monetary experts have been putting it down. With prices now at dizzying heights, defying the expectations of even its biggest fans, Bitcoin has entered a new era. Will it suddenly crash again like it did last month? Probably. But no one knows when. And what happens then is the big issue. The whole history of this…

There are many unexpected features of Tel Aviv–first among them is that it is a normal, happy, peaceful, prosperous city–but I couldn’t wait to write about one in particular. It’s loud. It’s happy. It’s straight out of 1920s. You just have to imagine an older hotel in the center of Tel Aviv. You walk through the lobby and around the corner, opening some tall doors with etched glass. Inside is a relatively small space populated by plush red sofas and tiny tables, so that when the space is full, you feel like you are nuzzled elbow to elbow. The place is…

The idea of having government assist after a natural disaster sounds great. It makes us feel good. Houston floods? Send millions. New Orleans floods? Send hundreds of millions. Puerto Rico? The place is a mess and needs billions and billions. It all seems right. The great truth about government is that every penny it spends must come from somewhere and must land somewhere else. Until you look at the details. Someone gets the money. Whether they are the same institutions who actually do the reconstruction is another matter. And what kind of relief they provide is another question. Other people’s…

John F. Kelly, White House chief of staff, gave a press conference to address the controversy over Trump’s remarks to a grieving mother of a soldier killed in action. Trump was reported to have been insensitive in saying that the kid “knew what he was getting into.” That remark sounds clumsy, but in content, Kelly said, it underscores the absolute heroism of anyone who signs up with a willingness to give your life for the country. The “serve or die” rule remains in place today, not only in Russia, China, and North Korea but also in the U.S. The powerful…

Last fall, the Arizona Republic ran a huge expose of a strange problem in the city. The city owns 1,400 lots of property, some 2.3 square miles in total, for no apparent reason. They are expensive to maintain, so many have become eyesores and have begun to drag down property values. Initially, city spokesmen denied the scope of the problem, claiming that there were only 50 or so lots. As it turns out, the city just didn’t know. After reviewing the issue (it took nearly a year), the city admitted that the scale of the problem is large. At least…

There I sat in the backseat of the Honda at the Atlanta airport, my Puerto Rican driver ready to drive me home. He has a full-time job, so this job with Lyft is just a side gig he does on Sundays to help make ends meet. As a passenger in the back seat, I assumed that I couldn’t get in trouble for mouthing off at the officer doing the shakedown. What was happening now he had never before experienced. Just as we were about to leave, an airport cop demanded to see his special permit for picking up from the…

What is the deal with all the strange attacks on the tech sector coming from Republicans and conservatives? It began in 2015, about the time of the rise of Trump in the GOP. Today, the hostility from the right toward tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook–and Silicon Valley in general–is growing more open and aggressive. For example, some activists have pushed the idea that these companies should be forced to declare themselves editorially neutral or else lose all protections from liability for posts by their users, a move that would expose such companies to an amazing thicket…

The surprisingly malleable timeline of the Las Vegas shooting reminds me of this quotation from George Orwell’s 1984: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” This timeline keeps changing for reasons unexplained, and each update is creating the appearance (without the admission) that something went very wrong. The worst mass shooting in modern American history seems to have taken place without wise intervention from those tasked with stopping such things. One of the injured has already filed a lawsuit against the Mandalay Bay hotel, concert promoters, and bump-stock manufacturers. Strangely left…

What is the future of banking, central banking and financial intermediation in a world in which cryptocurrency is dominant? Let’s speculate a bit, with the proviso that no one can fully anticipate how these markets will evolve. It is no wonder that the ruling class is concerned. We can find hints in the speech by IMF head Christine Lagarde at a Bank of England conference in September 2017. She dropped some words that likely sent some chills down a few spines in the audience. She explained that cryptocurrency is not a passing fad but a genuine innovation in money. The…

It’s not just that Obamacare is financially unsustainable. More seriously, it is intellectually unsustainable, even though this truth has been slow to emerge. This has come to an end with President Trump’s executive order. What does it do? It cuts subsidies to failing providers, yes. It also redefines the meaning of “short term” policies from one year to 90 days. But more importantly–and this is what has the pundit class in total meltdown–it liberalizes the rules for providers to serve health-coverage consumers. In the words of USA Today: the executive order permits a greater range of choice “by allowing more…

It feels strange writing about this topic, some 25 years after I had it completely settled in my mind. But nothing is ever really settled, I suppose. The claim that I had long ago concluded was a basic historical and economic fallacy is back in a big way. The claim is that society needs homogeneity to be orderly and free. It is a core claim of the alt-right and its sympathizers (and, in a different way, of the alt-left). It is what leads them to reject freedom as a path forward and embrace state control of demographics. It’s completely wrong….

I saw the movie Reds when it came out in 1981, and I still rewatch it to this day. After all these years, the movie holds up as one of the most intellectually interesting and visually powerful portrayals of lost history that I’ve seen. The movie stars Warren Beatty playing John Reed, the famous communist journalist who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World, a journalistic account of the Bolshevik revolution that whipped up a great deal of sympathy for the Bolsheviks in the United States. Diane Keaton plays his girlfriend and eventual wife, Louise Bryant. Emma Goldman tries to…

In the old days, people would go on diets to lose weight. People said it was about health, but it was usually about vanity. That’s fine. Then it really did become about health. Everyone I knew claimed to have some allergy to nuts, gluten, or lactose. These days, it seems like everyone has a highly curated diet, not just on grounds of preference and taste but rather tied to essential health needs, even some big spiritual philosophy, always with a big theory to back it. Who can even throw a dinner party anymore? Really you can’t. Who can even throw…

I saw the movie Reds when it came out in 1981, and I still rewatch it to this day. After all these years, the movie holds up as one of the most intellectually interesting and visually powerful portrayals of lost history that I’ve seen. The movie stars Warren Beatty playing John Reed, the famous communist journalist who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World, a journalistic account of the Bolshevik revolution that whipped up a great deal of sympathy for the Bolsheviks in the United States. Diane Keaton plays his girlfriend and eventual wife, Louise Bryant. Emma Goldman tries to…

It feels strange writing about this topic, some 25 years after I had it completely settled in my mind. But nothing is ever really settled, I suppose. The claim that I had long ago concluded was a basic historical and economic fallacy is back in a big way. The claim is that society needs homogeneity to be orderly and free. It is a core claim of the alt-right and its sympathizers (and, in a different way, of the alt-left). It is what leads them to reject freedom as a path forward and embrace state control of demographics. It’s completely wrong….

It’s not just that Obamacare is financially unsustainable. More seriously, it is intellectually unsustainable, even though this truth has been slow to emerge. This has come to an end with President Trump’s executive order. What does it do? It cuts subsidies to failing providers, yes. It also redefines the meaning of “short term” policies from one year to 90 days. But more importantly–and this is what has the pundit class in total meltdown–it liberalizes the rules for providers to serve health-coverage consumers. In the words of USA Today: the executive order permits a greater range of choice “by allowing more…

What is the future of banking, central banking and financial intermediation in a world in which cryptocurrency is dominant? Let’s speculate a bit, with the proviso that no one can fully anticipate how these markets will evolve. It is no wonder that the ruling class is concerned. We can find hints in the speech by IMF head Christine Lagarde at a Bank of England conference in September 2017. She dropped some words that likely sent some chills down a few spines in the audience. She explained that cryptocurrency is not a passing fad but a genuine innovation in money. The…

The surprisingly malleable timeline of the Las Vegas shooting reminds me of this quotation from George Orwell’s 1984: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” This timeline keeps changing for reasons unexplained, and each update is creating the appearance (without the admission) that something went very wrong. The worst mass shooting in modern American history seems to have taken place without wise intervention from those tasked with stopping such things. One of the injured has already filed a lawsuit against the Mandalay Bay hotel, concert promoters, and bump-stock manufacturers. Strangely left…

What is the deal with all the strange attacks on the tech sector coming from Republicans and conservatives? It began in 2015, about the time of the rise of Trump in the GOP. Today, the hostility from the right toward tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook–and Silicon Valley in general–is growing more open and aggressive. For example, some activists have pushed the idea that these companies should be forced to declare themselves editorially neutral or else lose all protections from liability for posts by their users, a move that would expose such companies to an amazing thicket…

There I sat in the backseat of the Honda at the Atlanta airport, my Puerto Rican driver ready to drive me home. He has a full-time job, so this is just a side gig he does on Sundays to help make ends meet. As a passenger in the back seat, I assumed that I couldn’t get in trouble for mouthing off at the officer doing the shakedown. What was happening now he had never before experienced. Just as we were about to leave, an airport cop demanded to see his special permit for picking up from the airport. He didn’t…

Last fall, the Arizona Republic ran a huge expose of a strange problem in the city. The city owns 1,400 lots of property, some 2.3 square miles in total, for no apparent reason. They are expensive to maintain, so many have become eyesores and have begun to drag down property values. Initially, city spokesmen denied the scope of the problem, claiming that there were only 50 or so lots. As it turns out, the city just didn’t know. After reviewing the issue (it took nearly a year), the city admitted that the scale of the problem is large. At…

Let’s talk about one of the most stressful aspects of professional life: asking for raises. I’ve been on both sides, asking for raises and being asked for raises. It’s a completely normal part of work life, nothing unusual. And yet people are terrified of the entire topic. It causes tremendous stress. It’s not entirely clear why. The labor contract is just an agreement between two parties, same as any other exchange. If you want to renegotiate and ask for different terms, that should be seen as just doing business. Somehow this is not what happens. Instead, the worker begins to…

Nothing about Jamie Dimon’s anti-Bitcoin explosion (“Bitcoin is a fraud”) made sense. The timing was weird. After all, Bitcoin has proven itself the world over since its first proof-of-concept back in October 2009. There was no real news out there that would have prompted the CEO of JP Morgan to blow up in a rage and say the following: “The currency isn’t going to work. You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart. If you were in Venezuela or Ecuador or North…

Nearly every song, and every solo, on Miles Davis’s album “Kind of Blue” I can play in my head. But sometimes it is not enough. I have to hear it again in real audible space. It never disappoints. In fact, it is nearly transcendent. I’m hardly alone in my opinion. It’s the biggest selling jazz album of all time, a fact I only know from reading Wikipedia. Thanks to my Google Home – how did we live without home assistants? – it comes up instantly with just a few words, and I listened all over again at 3am because I couldn’t…

The great classic of naturalist philosophy, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, is a fascinating book in so many ways: tremendously beautiful, personal, insightful, and moving. Thoreau was born 1817 and died 1862. He was an author, poet, anarchist, and abolitionist who wrote more than 20 volumes of essays. He made his home in Massachusetts and attended Harvard. He came to Walden to live after working in his parent’s pencil factory, to which he returned after leaving Walden. He made several patented improvements in the pencil. It is easy to understand why Walden has become part of the modern canon and…

Nearly everyone knows there is something wrong with the world as it is. The liberty-minded person believes that he or she knows a major part of what is wrong. There is not enough flexibility and adaptability in the structures of government that presume to manage the social order. State systems have made life rigid and regimented–replete with regulations, taxes, mandates, and prohibitions–with the cost that too many people are excluded, demoralized, and impoverished. For moral and practical reasons, this situation must end. The vast majority of the human family continues to live under the illusion that giving government more power…

The hot iron stopped generating steam, which meant that it was out of water. But no one really has a special tool for filling it up — at least not nearby– and you really don’t want to unplug it and take the whole hot iron to the sink. What to do? I tried dragging the iron to the sink while it was plugged in, which caused the cord to tangle and me to stumble a bit. The iron hit a beautiful stemmed wine glass that was on the counter and caused it to fly across the room. Oh no! The…

Many of my friends are going through the same problem. They have built up a certain following on social media. Could be YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Their fans expect a certain line, a tone, an approach, the voice of a cause they favor. You loved the love when it was there, but now you face the hate. Then one day, the message changes because time and circumstances change. Their friends denounce them and unfollow. Panic ensues, followed by real depression. This is true especially if one’s following is rooted in politics or religion. You take a position that your fan…

Absolutely nothing–no amount of regulation, no number of belligerent articles, no plethora of hectoring denunciations by big shots–is going to stop ICOs from completely disrupting the way companies raise funding in the future. The crypto market has been too wonderfully successful without the slightest help from government or the financial establishment. We already know. We’ve seen. The idea is out there. It’s already worked. The deed is done. Some tokens represent brilliant ideas, but many are pump-and-dumps, troll coins, or outright scams. But now the counter-revolution is underway, with governments leaning in, establishment spokesmen trying to spook markets, and incumbent…

My new article collection–Right Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty–is about the most unexpected ideological development of our time. It concerns the revival of a tradition of interwar collectivist thought that might at first seem like a hybrid but was distinctly mainstream between the two world wars. What is this thing we have encountered, this strange movement that is alive and growing in Europe and the United States? It is anti-communist but not for the usual reasons: it is thoroughly against freedom as understood in the liberal tradition. It opposes free trade, freedom of association, free migration, and capitalism…

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard,” a “frightened dog,” a “rogue,” and a “gangster.” This is his response to Trump’s having called the “Rocket Man” an obvious “madman.” This conflict could result in mass death. It sounds like the usual Twitter war. Or think of any other normal conflict in your life. You have coworkers who are fighting, family members who are squabbling, neighbors who you don’t like and don’t like you. In an ideal world, we would all get along. Sadly, that ideal will always be elusive. What’s the difference in the…

I was at a church service Sunday and, during one part, the program instructed people to “stand or kneel.” People did one or the other. I don’t know why people chose to stand or kneel. But no one was upset either way. It was all peaceful and beautiful. I like to think of this diversity of expression as protective of the freedom of conscience. To be sure, any private organization that wants to impose one way or the other is within its rights. The NFL can let players stand or kneel or impose one way. But let us never give…

This was yet another weekend in which the attempt to repeal Obamacare died, yet again. It is probably the last time it will die, too. Maybe. Or perhaps the corpse will be dug up again before year’s end, flogged, and reburied again. Instead of working for ACA repeal, Trump whipped up a national frenzy against sports stars and a foreign despot. We are left with an amazing reality: the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land, even after the promise to repeal (according to exit polls) provided the margin of victory for the 2016 election itself and even…

Donald Trump has revived his earlier tax proposal that would (it appears) reduce taxes for everyone. The predictable debate has already begun with all the usual posturing. Is this mainly for the rich? Any tax cut worth doing will disproportionately benefit the rich because the rich pay most of the taxes. That is a given, so anyone barking up this tree is just gaming the debate in hopes of inciting envy. A massive tax cut for everyone is the cure we need right now to stop the politics of mutual recrimination and hate.What’s important here is that cutting taxes on “the…

There are so many products and services that claim to make you smarter. It’s a huge industry. Get-smart video games and puzzles are everywhere. Websites and apps that promise fast results are booming. We can easily fool ourselves into thinking we are intellectually fit. I’m a skeptic of the tools being promoted these days, but not of the overall idea. It makes complete sense. Not everyone is a born genius in every area, but everyone can surely improve the efficiency and functioning of the mind you have. Heaven knows we think enough about getting our bodies in shape. Maniacal energy…

In a remarkably frank talk at a Bank of England conference, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund has speculated that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have as much of a future as the Internet itself. It could displace central banks, conventional banking, and challenge the monopoly of national monies. Christine Lagarde–a Paris native who has held her position at the IMF since 2011–says the only substantial problems with existing cryptocurrency are fixable over time. In the long run, the technology itself can replace national monies, conventional financial intermediation, and even “puts a question mark on the fractional banking model we know today.”…

My father was a happy person. But on the first or last Saturday of the month, every month, he was miserable. He would wake in a grumpy mood, say nothing at breakfast, listen to no one around him, and at 10am, would slump into the small wood paneled room he called his office. He would gather piles of mail around him, dig through to find his books, heave a big sigh and get to work. It was time to “pay bills.” Growing up, I didn’t know what that meant other than: today is the day not to speak to Dad….

Normal commercial life today offers so many opportunities to be charitable. Cashiers remind you to be kind to others at every checkout. It’s pretty great, actually, to see commercial capitalism evolve into a font of philanthropy at the point of exchange. What if the government had imposed a $5 tax on haircuts? For example, I got a haircut yesterday. While paying, the stylist asked if I would like bring an ice cream treat to a poor child in a hospital. How could I say no to an invitation that pushed every single button in my heart and soul? So I…

To observe that a tax reform primarily helps the rich is supposed to doom it. It should be the opposite: no tax reform is worth pursuing unless it primarily helps the rich. That’s because the current system mainly hurts the rich. It is wildly unfair, discourages wealth creation, and punishes people for doing everything an economy is supposed to do, which is boost incomes and living standards for as many as possible. The current system mainly targets the rich. You would never know this by listening to the main debate on the street today, which rarely deals with the facts….

To observe that a tax reform primarily helps the rich is supposed to doom it. It should be the opposite: no tax reform is worth pursuing unless it primarily helps the rich. That’s because the current system mainly hurts the rich. It is wildly unfair, discourages wealth creation, and punishes people for doing everything an economy is supposed to do, which is boost incomes and living standards for as many as possible. The current system mainly targets the rich. You would never know this by listening to the main debate on the street today, which rarely deals with the facts….

Normal commercial life today offers so many opportunities to be charitable. Cashiers remind you to be kind to others at every checkout. It’s pretty great, actually, to see commercial capitalism evolve into a font of philanthropy at the point of exchange. What if the government had imposed a $5 tax on haircuts? For example, I got a haircut yesterday. While paying, the stylist asked if I would like bring an ice cream treat to a poor child in a hospital. How could I say no to an invitation that pushed every single button in my heart and soul? So I…

My father was a happy person. But on the first or last Saturday of the month, every month, he was miserable. He would wake in a grumpy mood, say nothing at breakfast, listen to no one around him, and at 10am, would slump into the small wood paneled room he called his office. He would gather piles of mail around him, dig through to find his books, heave a big sigh and get to work. It was time to “pay bills.” Growing up, I didn’t know what that meant other than: today is the day not to speak to Dad….

In a remarkably frank talk at a Bank of England conference, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund has speculated that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have as much of a future as the Internet itself. It could displace central banks, conventional banking, and challenge the monopoly of national monies. Christine Lagarde–a Paris native who has held her position at the IMF since 2011–says the only substantial problems with existing cryptocurrency are fixable over time. In the long run, the technology itself can replace national monies, conventional financial intermediation, and even “puts a question mark on the fractional banking model we know today.”…

There are so many products and services that claim to make you smarter. It’s a huge industry. Get-smart video games and puzzles are everywhere. Websites and apps that promise fast results are booming. We can easily fool ourselves into thinking we are intellectually fit. I’m a skeptic of the tools being promoted these days, but not of the overall idea. It makes complete sense. Not everyone is a born genius in every area, but everyone can surely improve the efficiency and functioning of the mind you have. Heaven knows we think enough about getting our bodies in shape. Maniacal energy…

Donald Trump has revived his earlier tax proposal that would (it appears) reduce taxes for everyone. The predictable debate has already begun with all the usual posturing. Is this mainly for the rich? Any tax cut worth doing will disproportionately benefit the rich because the rich pay most of the taxes. That is a given, so anyone barking up this tree is just gaming the debate in hopes of inciting envy. A massive tax cut for everyone is the cure we need right now to stop the politics of mutual recrimination and hate.What’s important here is that cutting taxes on “the…

This was yet another weekend in which the attempt to repeal Obamacare died, yet again. It is probably the last time it will die, too. Maybe. Or perhaps the corpse will be dug up again before year’s end, flogged, and reburied again. Instead of working for ACA repeal, Trump whipped up a national frenzy against sports stars and a foreign despot. We are left with an amazing reality: the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land, even after the promise to repeal (according to exit polls) provided the margin of victory for the 2016 election itself and even…

I was at a church service Sunday and, during one part, the program instructed people to “stand or kneel.” People did one or the other. I don’t know why people chose to stand or kneel. But no one was upset either way. It was all peaceful and beautiful. I like to think of this diversity of expression as protective of the freedom of conscience. To be sure, any private organization that wants to impose one way or the other is within its rights. The NFL can let players stand or kneel or impose one way. But let us never give…

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard,” a “frightened dog,” a “rogue,” and a “gangster.” This is his response to Trump’s having called the “Rocket Man” an obvious “madman.” This conflict could result in mass death. It sounds like the usual Twitter war. Or think of any other normal conflict in your life. You have coworkers who are fighting, family members who are squabbling, neighbors who you don’t like and don’t like you. In an ideal world, we would all get along. Sadly, that ideal will always be elusive. What’s the difference in the…

My new article collection–Right Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty–is about the most unexpected ideological development of our time. It concerns the revival of a tradition of interwar collectivist thought that might at first seem like a hybrid but was distinctly mainstream between the two world wars. What is this thing we have encountered, this strange movement that is alive and growing in Europe and the United States? It is anti-communist but not for the usual reasons: it is thoroughly against freedom as understood in the liberal tradition. It opposes free trade, freedom of association, free migration, and capitalism…

Absolutely nothing–no amount of regulation, no number of belligerent articles, no plethora of hectoring denunciations by big shots–is going to stop ICOs from completely disrupting the way companies raise funding in the future. The crypto market has been too wonderfully successful without the slightest help from government or the financial establishment. We already know. We’ve seen. The idea is out there. It’s already worked. The deed is done. Some tokens represent brilliant ideas, but many are pump-and-dumps, troll coins, or outright scams. But now the counter-revolution is underway, with governments leaning in, establishment spokesmen trying to spook markets, and incumbent…

Many of my friends are going through the same problem. They have built up a certain following on social media. Could be YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Their fans expect a certain line, a tone, an approach, the voice of a cause they favor. You loved the love when it was there, but now you face the hate. Then one day, the message changes because time and circumstances change. Their friends denounce them and unfollow. Panic ensues, followed by real depression. This is true especially if one’s following is rooted in politics or religion. You take a position that your fan…

The hot iron stopped generating steam, which meant that it was out of water. But no one really has a special tool for filling it up — at least not nearby– and you really don’t want to unplug it and take the whole hot iron to the sink. What to do? I tried dragging the iron to the sink while it was plugged in, which caused the cord to tangle and me to stumble a bit. The iron hit a beautiful stemmed wine glass that was on the counter and caused it to fly across the room. Oh no! The…

Nearly everyone knows there is something wrong with the world as it is. The liberty-minded person believes that he or she knows a major part of what is wrong. There is not enough flexibility and adaptability in the structures of government that presume to manage the social order. State systems have made life rigid and regimented–replete with regulations, taxes, mandates, and prohibitions–with the cost that too many people are excluded, demoralized, and impoverished. For moral and practical reasons, this situation must end. The vast majority of the human family continues to live under the illusion that giving government more power…

The great classic of naturalist philosophy, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, is a fascinating book in so many ways: tremendously beautiful, personal, insightful, and moving. Thoreau was born 1817 and died 1862. He was an author, poet, anarchist, and abolitionist who wrote more than 20 volumes of essays. He made his home in Massachusetts and attended Harvard. He came to Walden to live after working in his parent’s pencil factory, to which he returned after leaving Walden. He made several patented improvements in the pencil. It is easy to understand why Walden has become part of the modern canon and…

Nearly every song, and every solo, on Miles Davis’s album “Kind of Blue” I can play in my head. But sometimes it is not enough. I have to hear it again in real audible space. It never disappoints. In fact, it is nearly transcendent. I’m hardly alone in my opinion. It’s the biggest selling jazz album of all time, a fact I only know from reading Wikipedia. Thanks to my Google Home – how did we live without home assistants? – it comes up instantly with just a few words, and I listened all over again at 3am because I couldn’t…

There’s a new wrinkle in the story of one of the largest data breaches in history. The hack of Equifax may have compromised the personal data of one in five Americans. The hackers have now demanded a ransom with the threat of releasing that information to the commercial marketplace (“monetizing the information”). They are demanding 600 Bitcoins, which is worth about $2.4 million. “We are two people trying to solve our lives and those of our families. We did not expect to get as much information as we did, nor do we want to affect any citizen. But we need…

This summer, for whatever reason, fruit flies were out in full force. If you opened your back door only briefly, you would be swatting those nasty things for days. It was so bad for me that I dreaded opening the door at all. It is not a door at all. It is a piece of mesh that fits over the whole opening of the door.Why doesn’t a screen door keep them out? It might have but I had no screen door. Because of the shape of the frame, I didn’t think there was any prospect of getting one. Then one…

Let’s talk about one of the most stressful aspects of professional life: asking for raises. I’ve been on both sides, asking for raises and being asked for raises. It’s a completely normal part of work life, nothing unusual. And yet people are terrified of the entire topic. It causes tremendous stress. It’s not entirely clear why. The labor contract is just an agreement between two parties, same as any other exchange. If you want to renegotiate and ask for different terms, that should be seen as just doing business. Somehow this is not what happens. Instead, the worker begins to…

Nothing about Jamie Dimon’s anti-Bitcoin explosion (“Bitcoin is a fraud”) made sense. The timing was weird. After all, Bitcoin has proven itself the world over since its first proof-of-concept back in October 2009. There was no real news out there that would have prompted the CEO of JP Morgan to blow up in a rage and say the following: “The currency isn’t going to work. You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart. If you were in Venezuela or Ecuador or North…

The fast and furious rise of the alt-right in Europe, the UK, and the US has caught many people intellectually off-guard. I can speak for myself in this respect. My education and reading prepared me well to understand the statism of the left. My instincts became finely tuned. The threat to liberty from the right was always an abstraction: something that happened in history but had no present relevance. The roots of this new movement are much deeper than, for example, the Trump campaign.Herein lies the danger of ever having considered yourself a completed intellectual. There is always more to…

There’s a new wrinkle in the story of one of the largest data breaches in history. The hack of Equifax may have compromised the personal data of one in five Americans. The hackers have now demanded a ransom with the threat of releasing that information to the commercial marketplace (“monetizing the information”). They are demanding 600 Bitcoins, which is worth about $2.4 million. “We are two people trying to solve our lives and those of our families. We did not expect to get as much information as we did, nor do we want to affect any citizen. But we need…

This summer, for whatever reason, fruit flies were out in full force. If you opened your back door only briefly, you would be swatting those nasty things for days. It was so bad for me that I dreaded opening the door at all. It is not a door at all. It is a piece of mesh that fits over the whole opening of the door.Why doesn’t a screen door keep them out? It might have but I had no screen door. Because of the shape of the frame, I didn’t think there was any prospect of getting one. Then one…

A major project of mine for the last three years has been to trace the origin and development of the ideas that led to today’s alt-right activists. They have emerged on the political scene suddenly and with impressive ferocity. Some people just assume that they represent nothing but a melange of hate and racism. Even the most dumbed-down political movement is built by slaves of defunct philosophers. This is too simple. Even the most dumbed-down political movement is built by slaves of defunct philosophers. But which ones? And does the worldview cohere to the point that we can anticipate the…

It is a fact: the United States is one of the best spots in the world for freedom of the press. The courts do not stand ready to persecute people for saying and printing things merely because they annoy people with power. In this way, the US is far ahead of most countries in the world, where libel law is frequently used to quash the freedom to speak. This is an especially pressing issue in times when anyone with a Twitter account has the power to reach billions. We are all members of the press. We all need the freedoms…

Five years ago, the following would have been inconceivable. In a 48-hour period, the dollar/bitcoin exchange ratio dropped fully $1,000. A day later, half the gains came back. In the Bitcoin community, this was hardly discussed at all. Not even the websites and writers specializing in the topic wrote much about it. Hysterical claims that “Bitcoin is dead” were at a minimum. The market cap of the entire sector, as of this writing, is an astonishing $170 billion.To me, that’s mind blowing. It’s a different world from the one I entered when I received my first bitcoin. A friend tells…

The fast and furious rise of the alt-right in Europe, the UK, and the US has caught many people intellectually off-guard. I can speak for myself in this respect. My education and reading prepared me well to understand the statism of the left. My instincts became finely tuned. The threat to liberty from the right was always an abstraction: something that happened in history but had no present relevance. The roots of this new movement are much deeper than, for example, the Trump campaign.Herein lies the danger of ever having considered yourself a completed intellectual. There is always more to…

When a Catholic does something wrong, he or she says “mea culpa.” It means: it’s my fault, and I’m sorry about that. It’s the human way to turn sad things into happy things. But what about faults that actually end up with good results? It turns out that we are surrounded by them. They are everywhere. There is a handy Latin phrase for that too: felix culpa. It means happy fault. This refers to something you did wrong or of which you are a seeming victim, something with immediate results that seem regrettable, but because of either a correction that…

“Economics puts parameters on people’s utopias.” Yes. That’s exactly it. That’s why the politicians hate economics. That’s why the media are so… selective over which economists they call on to talk about policy. That’s why the economics departments in colleges are put down by the sociologists, philosophers, literature professors and just about anyone else who has romantic longings for a coerced utopia. “The teachings of the principles of economics should inform as much on what not to do, perhaps even more than providing a guide to public action.” Economists just keep bursting people’s bubbles.That’s it again. Don’t control prices. Don’t…

It’s always an occasion of note when Paul Krugman says a true thing. And it has happened. “Given the powers we grant to the president, who in some ways is almost like an elected dictator, giving the office to someone likely to abuse that power invites catastrophe.” Abused power is indeed potentially catastrophic. Perhaps there is an alternative to creating the moral hazard in the first place? If you advertise the position of dictator, you shouldn’t be surprised when the wrong kind of person applies for the job. The hashtag #NeverTrump should really be #NeverRiskAnotherTrump.The idea of an “elected dictator”…

Liberty-minded people are doing a lot of soul-searching these days. It’s probably needed. In case you haven’t heard, many academic and media observers are on a hunt to discover the origin of the bizarre and violent alt-right (Klan, Nazi, and so on) marchers and protesters who appeared in Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting genocidal slogans. Every day new stories appear. To the horror of many dedicated intellectuals and activists in the liberty space, some journalists have tried to link this movement backward in time to the libertarian political movement as it developed over the last decade. Some of the most prominent alt-right…

He holds a PhD in mathematics. He reads constantly. He is a warm human being. He is interested in everything: sciences, art, music, religion, history. He has balanced and interesting views on nearly every topic. He dreams big. Still, he can’t get a job. Why? It’s hard to say, but the problem can be summed up with this: he just can’t get it together. We’ve all known brilliant but eccentric people who have a hard time finding a place for themselves.He is an eccentric. There are millions of them, and they are some of the best minds among us. There…

The writing temperament of Ludwig von Mises was precise, formal, and brilliant. Especially concerning economic theory, all the steps of logic are there. He seeks to create structures of thought the way masons make buildings. Every point extends from somewhere and leads to somewhere. It is sometimes passionate and fiery but only once that display of emotion has been justified by the argumentation. It must have been amazing to be there. Sometimes, however, you wish that Mises would pull back and relax just a bit, speak more informally, ruminate based on his encyclopedic knowledge. It is not always necessary to construct…

It’s the fight of the century but what are the economic implications? More than half a billion dollars is going to change hands. Pundits are screaming that this is nothing but a “money grab.” This fight is not about money moving from here to there.People who can’t afford it, they say, are going to shell out $100 bucks to gawk at two dudes punching each other. And the organizers are going to make a killing. Look at this from the point of view of an earnest central planner. It seems like an economic disaster. All this money is being transferred…

I’m at dinner and the hostess serves me pie for dessert. I gobble it up. Then the hostess says, “Would you like another piece?” I politely decline. In her head, she is thinking “he hates my pie,” but this is totally wrong. I love her pie, especially the first piece. But the second piece has slipped from A to B in my preference ranking, and “no pie” has moved from B to A. I’m not making a judgment on the whole stock of goods, I’m choosing based on my perceived value of the incremental unit. This is a gigantic difference….

It’s a rule of social and political movements that they cannot fully control the outcome of their efforts. Actions cause reactions, many of them unanticipated and certainly unintended. This is because no group, no matter how powerful, can control the human minds of others not part of their cause. This is why so many movements driven by a revolt ethos and revolutionary intentions have created so many unforeseen messes that are often the opposite of their stated aims. So it is with the “Unite the Right” (alt-right, fascist, white supremacist, revanchist, Nazi, and so on) marchers who descended on the…

Over the weekend, I heard something that I never imagined possible. It is music written exclusively for the human voice – music from the High Middle Ages that gave birth to modernity as we know it – re-imagined and re-presented for electronic instruments only. The results are mind blowing, and it’s not just about one song or one genre It’s about what the results tell us about the human imagination and its interaction with the flow of time. The scholastics believed in the unity of all truth.The musical shift in the early Renaissance came about from changes in economics and…

Someone just told me that I can say to my digital home assistant, “Buy me some new toilet paper” and it will arrive the next day. It’s true. But I can’t do that right now. I don’t want to interrupt “You Go To My Head” performed by Chet Baker as part of an amazing jazz mix I chose from my computer to display and play on my huge TV that is about one inch thick (as compared to my childhood big-back TV which was thicker than the display). Mind changed: now I’m listening to Tudor-era music by John Taverner. I…

The vast majority of people in the United States have no interest whatsoever in street battles between the alt-right (better described today in more poignant terms) and the counter-protesters. Most people have normal problems like paying bills, dealing with kids, getting health care, keeping life together under all the usual strains, and mostly want these weird people to go away. So, of course, people are shocked at scenes of young people in the streets of this picturesque town with a university founded by Thomas Jefferson screaming, “Jews will not replace us.” What this is about is bad ideas. They crawl…

Humor as a medium tends to have a short shelf life. Things that made people roar in laughter in the 1950s tend to strike us as lame today. I can watch humorous films from the 1930s and sit there stone-faced the entire time. A literature expert will point out a joke in some medieval text and it is completely lost on me. A huge exception here is Oscar Wilde’s incredibly funny The Importance of Being Earnest. I’ve read it so many times that I have whole sections memorized, and I could read it again now and still laugh and laugh….

History buffs have been weirded out that the political culture seems like the 1930s all over again. Well, if you are fed up with that, how about we try the 1830s instead? It was a war for opiumLet’s revisit the Opium Wars, as Donald Trump is determined to do. Then, like now, the drug problem – one that roiled world politics and led to massive political upheaval in China – traces to government action in response to some people’s desire to get high. The Opium Wars In Brief China’s problem with opium began in the late 18th century during a period of…

Now, this is revealing. The New York Times ran a piece on Bitcoin with this sentence: “from less than a cent in early 2010 to around $2,600 currently.” The problem is that when the story went live, the price was actually $3,400.” An editor didn’t think to check it, because he or she didn’t know to do so. This is how quickly these markets are moving. Not even the people assigned to be experts know enough to do a competent edit. And this is precisely why so many of us are constantly intrigued by these markets. Cryptofriends There is some…

I had already completed 16 years of schooling when I took a class to prepare for entrance exams to law school (I decided not to go). First order of business for nailing the exam: the study of logic. My mind was absolutely blown. I was stunned to discover that there are rules for thinking, proofs for making sense or spouting nonsense. The first time I heard the book recommended by someone I highly respect was two years ago.Discovering this changed me, but I was also slightly angry: why had no one told me this many years ago? Why was I…

It might at first seem to be a strange paradox. The stock market has reached a new and rocking high. Hiring seems to be on pace. Unemployment is low. New hirings are up. Corporate earnings are solid. New technologies are coming at us so hard – startup capital has dramatically shifted to the ICO market – hardly anyone can keep up. Economic growth itself is still far too slow but in every other way, economic performance is not shabby. Donald Trump likes to take the credit. The phrase “Trump Bump” still has resonance. But Why? What if the silliness and…

The history of fascist ideology extends from the early 19th century though our own times: from Fichte to Hegel to Carlyle to List to Ruskin to Spengler to Grant to Spann to Gentile to Schmitt and (skipping a half century) finally to thousands of meme-posting sock puppets on Twitter. These thinkers are united in their loathing of capitalism but also opposition to communism, which is the feature of their identity that is considered right-wing. Things were never as weird with this camp as during the interwar period, particularly among the intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals) that rallied political movements toward violence and…

You really have to hand it to the marketing team of Atomic Blonde, the smash hit thriller starring the mighty and immensely talented Charlize Theron. I can just imagine the way it must have gone. Production: “This film is a serious piece of political historiography. It’s about remembering. Many young workers today were born after the Berlin Wall fell. We are in danger of losing a consciousness that communism in Europe even existed, much less how it ended. This film takes us back and shows what tyranny feels like and why it had to end.” Marketing: “That’s fine but no…

If any good was to come from the November 2016 election – a clean sweep by opponents of Obamacare – it was surely that health care policy could get on a better footing. So far, the cynics have been proven right: the GOP majority and White House have failed at what was arguably their highest legislative priority. And there is nothing voters can do about it. I’m willing to bet that this will be a pattern for years to come. Why? Because this has been the pattern for years in the past, and there is no ideological consensus for real…

The collection Prosperity through Freedom (now available in ebook) appeared as the postwar liberty movement in America was beginning to mature. FEE had been founded in 1946, and had accomplished amazing things in a decade and a half. It took a brilliant idea and turned it into a real cultural force. Its principles all revolved around the practical and moral case for the free society. In this snapshot in time, you find the principles stated and reapplied on many issues. Fertig was a man of quiet dignity who had enormous influence behind the scenes. Ad Man for Liberty And there is a special…

To be sure, the question in this article’s title is entirely rhetorical, because the regulators surely don’t know what they are doing. Certainly no one active in the blockchain industry knows precisely what the SEC is doing. That is being debated all over the world right now. Is this just the usual pretend excuse of consumer protection? This much seems clear: arbitrary government power will henceforth threaten constantly to hobble the advance of distributed ledger technology, trying for force fit it into some old model that exists on regulatory books, so long as doing so is viable until technological evolution…

Once again, Congress is legislating sweeping sanctions on a country, this time against Russia. What is behind this? It’s purely symbolic, supposedly in response to Russia’s hacking and meddling ways, as if a whole country should be held responsible for the alleged actions of a few or even one, and without a shred of evidence that this is due to encouragement or support from the top. Even if it were, why should a country be blamed for the malice of its leaders?. TThe leadership now has a scapegoat to rile up the population.here’s no thought here put into the results…

I was pleased to be interviewed by CNN over the weekend, but even more pleased that my words and thoughts weren’t distorted to serve an agenda. The entire report on CNN, as it turns out, was relatively “fair and balanced,” as they say. There were two big questions that the reporter sought to answer. What is FreedomFest? And what do people who generally regard themselves as libertarians think of Trump and the Trump administration? Of course this line of thinking frustrates those of us who work in the educational and not the political business. It’s our conviction that the path…

“I’m sitting at home binging Netflix,” my Lyft driver explained, “when suddenly I think: I could be making money right now!” Then she hops off the sofa to grab the next notification that comes in. She is out driving yet again. Instead of feeling like a wastrel, she feels productive, energetic, awesome. She loves her new life. This is how my Lyft driver explained how her job has changed her outlook on the world. “Now I understand how this works.” The cost of what she is doing now is what she could otherwise be doing. Knowing this has changed her…

The phrase “creative rights” is one of the great misnomers. No one can take from you the right to be creative, and that right certainly isn’t granted by some government office. And yet, the phrase is commonly invoked as a synonym for “intellectual property,” laws, which are laws that actually stop creative people from freely marketing the products of their labor. It’s a hard topic that requires a lot of thought.Once you realize that “intellectual property” laws are completely unnecessary, there is no going back. You see that innovation happens despite them, not because of them. You see that they…

In the early days of Bitcoin, by which I mean only a few years ago, people would dismiss the new currency this way, “Can I use it to pay my local sandwich shop? If not, it is not a money.” There is not some switch in the sky that transforms a non-money into a money.That’s true as stated but trivial. If you don’t have it, or if you have it and can’t find anyone to take it, it is not a money for you. In that same way, I don’t own any Birr, the currency of Ethiopia, and no one…

As the movie started and the plane took off into the air, the gentleman next to me pulled out a paper bag. It was McDonald’s from one of many locations in the Chicago airport. There are always long lines in front of each. In the bag was a serving of hash browns and an egg McMuffin. This was an evening flight. Here was another customer benefitting from the new all-day breakfast menu. It smelled amazing, and he was very happy. Everyone around was jealous. A McDonald’s Movie! I’m thrilled to recommend this movie very highly.I was remiss in seeing The…

Absolutely amazing. Even tragic. The Republicans railed against the proven failure that is Obamacare for years and voted at least half a dozen times to repeal it. It was the most important issue of the entire 2016 election. Then the GOP gained control – House, Senate, Presidency – and what happened? So far, nothing. There is no agreement on what a replacement should look like. It is entirely possible that four years from now, nothing important will have changed. Who or what is at fault? People blame partisanship, special interests, public opinion, plots, bad leadership, annoying lobbyists, feckless careerism, the…

Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean, which has become a surprising bestseller, purports to be a study and exposé of the “radical right’s stealth plan for America.” But to anyone who knows something about the subject she covers, the book serves an unintended function. It is a study in the wild paranoia and recklessness of a fanatic academic ideologue who can’t tell shiz from shoe polish. Ideology can cause you to see things that aren’t there. There is so much to say about this book, none that would be worth saying if not for the attention it has garnered. Turning the…

FEE has dug deep in its archive to discover the most interesting book from 1932: A Practical Program for America. It’s so revealing of where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. It’s a book purporting to provide a practical plan for dealing with the depression, which was not yet the “great” depression. Which way would liberalism finally turn? If you flip quickly through this book, you will see extremely naive defenses and celebrations of unemployment insurance, higher taxes, farm subsidies, national planning for electrical power, public housing, and countercyclical monetary policy. Any astute reader will ask: “Why in the…

Not everyone who goes around celebrating the achievements of The West and decrying its destruction is a true friend of freedom. We’ve known this since at least a century ago, when the acclaimed German historian Oswald Spengler wrote his magisterial tome The Decline of the West (1919). Trump’s speech was sometimes beautiful and inspiring and others times strangely ominous.The book goes on for 800 pages about the magnificence of Western arts, sciences, literature, and wealth, but that’s not its thesis. The purpose of the treatise was to issue a dark warning: the West must be tribalized under a new Caesarism and…

The mainstream press has accused Hobby Lobby, a great and beloved American company, of hypocrisy, unchristian behavior, smuggling, stealing, and even funding terrorism. As punishment, and concluding an investigation that has been going on for six years, the US government has extracted from the company a fine of $3 million, and the company is sending to the government property it bought fair and square. What Hobby Lobby was doing could have finally saved this sacred history on behalf of the whole of humanity.What horrible things did the company do? It purchased from sketchy sources in the Middle East thousands of…

I constantly get the question: why do we need this blockchain thing anyway? Here is why. Every society with a vibrant commercial life exalts private property as an institution. The entrenchment of this institution occurs in three stages. All three are essential. The first stage is to create private property itself. This is usually done out of the necessity of getting enough to eat. Contrary to every socialist claim, this doesn’t happen through magic or authoritarian dictate. You need fences to grow things and raise animals, and you need your neighbors to regard them as inviolable. To invade them must…

On July 4, we celebrate something called the nation, but what is a nation? What is the source of our affections and loyalties? Do you have a clear understanding of your own belief?We all assume that we know the answer to the question. But when you drill down, you find out that there is no clear agreement. In fact, disagreement on this vital issue is a huge source of division and political strife in the world today. Divergent views on what constitutes nationhood is one aspect of why Trump’s claims make sense to his followers but not to the editorial…

The local press dutifully reprints government press releases, such as when a local restaurant fails a health-code inspection. People are supposed to get very scared and avoid the place. I suspect that most readers ignore these reports unless the violations are utterly shocking, which they rarely are. Waffle House occupies a special place in American life.Speaking as someone who has worked in many food-service venues, I can promise you that every restaurant is in violation at some level. Indeed, the whole premise of these inspections is wrong: public-sector bureaucrats have far less interest in food health than restaurants and their…

It’s one thing to read about cryptoeconomics and another thing to actually do it. I had been reading about Bitcoin in the abstract from 2009, but it wasn’t until I became an owner in 2013 that I began to realize the implications of this technology. My boots were on the ground, as they say, and I saw and experienced things I never imagined possible. A money and payment system in one application? Made entirely from code? Invented by an anonymous programmer and gradually adopted in a globally distributed system run by hobbyists? The whole thing seemed crazy. Instead of being…

It was the World Series. Then Brexit. Then the US presidential election. Then the Super Bowl. But of all the shocking upsets that have rocked my world, the Great Office Pizza Contest of 2017 is the one that stands out the most. Of the two great pizzerias in Atlanta – Antico’s and Varasano’s – it was Varasano’s that was the obvious favorite to win. It has more prestige, you know. But it was not to be. Antico’s won 17 to 9 in the office poll following the most fun office party I’ve ever attended. Here is how the whole thing…

Some years ago, I became intrigued by the culture and economy of the Gilded Age (America, roughly 1870 to 1913), the last glimmer of the Belle Époque. These were the final decades of the age of laissez faire, a time of astonishing invention, life expansion, explosive prosperity, and peace. A new world was being born. A new ruling class was born too, not of privilege but of merit in a capitalist economy. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in times when the biggest threat to social order was the ongoing war between the Hatfields and McCoys?For most Americans, this period of…

A statue in front of the Federal Trade Commission shows a horse (the market) being restrained by a man (government). The idea is that the horse is physically determined but wild, driven by instinct, and potentially destructive. The man is strong but mostly works with his mind with the purpose of correcting the excesses of the horse through mental determination and rational intelligence. The statue embodies that classical New Deal mindset: without government, economic forces lead to social disaster. In the currently emerging cryptoeconomy, however, the roles are reversed. The crypoteconomy refers to a growing array of emerging technologies, rooted…

Earlier this month was the 9th annual Silly Putty Drop at the North Carolina State science and engineering summer camp. Campers watch a 100-pound ball of silly putty fall 141 feet and splat on the ground. The results are not very interesting actually. It breaks into a gazillion pieces. Here’s the video from a few years ago. What is actually interesting is how a huge cultural impact this product has. Looking at its history, you can learn many lessons about product innovation and consumer culture. You can learn so much about the way the world works just by looking at…

Even with all the news of terrorism around the world, there is something especially chilling and horrifying about the case of 22-year-old Otto Warmbier. Hearing the news of his death wounded me, and, I admit, more so than the usual litany of suffering around the world. If there is anything redeeming to come of this, it should be a wake-up call to all of us to change the way we think about human rights and stop a terrible trajectory of public rhetoric. It tells you all you need to know that the regime believed that this was a high crime….

What’s the single greatest invention in human history? I would argue that the answer is private property. If you understand why, then you should also have a profound appreciation for another great invention in human history: the blockchain. They are mutually reinforcing. In fact, humanity has never had a better tool for keeping up with property claims under complex, globalized, digital economic structures. We need people to agree on what belongs to whom.Let’s go back in time, say 150,000 years ago, when there were plenty of berries and slow-moving animals around to feed the few people around who needed to…

The gunman who attempted to slay Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice had a Facebook feed. Before it was deleted, everyone could read his vitriolic attacks on the rich, his denunciations of capitalism and corporate culture, his calls for high taxes and wealth redistribution, and, of course, his push for Bernie Sanders to be the ruler of us all. We all know the litany of gripes that drove him. When was the last time you heard a sermon against envy or observed a media figure casually recognizing its evils?And yet, when the folks at National Public Radio were reflecting on…

FEE is enormously pleased to announce the first-ever Collected Works of Leonard Read, a single download of all his books and articles, a literary legacy of one million words and 10,000 pages, fully searchable and unrestricted by digital rights management. Thanks to the genius of digital distribution, it is a speedy download and can be carried around on any digital device. Any version of the modern history of libertarian ideas that excludes his role is incomplete.In ways that are not fully appreciated today – and perhaps this effort will change that – Leonard Read was the font of the liberty…

The horrifying scene at a practice field in Alexandria, Virginia, at which Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in a shocking flurry of gunfire, could have been much worse. Rand Paul pointed out that “it would have been a massacre” had a member of the House leadership not been there. His presence guaranteed that the heavily armed Capitol Police could take him down. Many others present expressed similar feelings. They were sitting ducks. If the offensive gunfire could not be met by defensive gunfire, the bloodshed would have been far worse. As this case shows – and there are millions more…

Oh sure, I remember window-cleaning hell all too well, and so do you.This product took drudgery and made it joyful. My lifetime dream of the perfect bathroom mirror is mine. Of course, at the time, I didn’t fully know how horrible it was. Now I do, thanks to the innovation of Window Wipes: disposable moist towelettes for cleaning glass. It solves a massive, lifetime problem/annoyance I didn’t know I had. Now I absolutely love cleaning mirrors, oven doors, chrome handles, anything that needs to shine. This product took drudgery and made it joyful. My lifetime dream of the perfect bathroom…

One of the joys of life is outsmarting the bureaucrats and regulators. They are constantly seeking to ruin our lives with demands that we comply. Free men and women must resist. The bureaucratization of our lives has created strange anomalies. In the physical world, the government has never been more coThe digital world is mostly unregulated. Hence, our digital devices are ever-more amazing. We can adjust our thermostats with voice commands. We can see who is standing at the front door, even if we are vacationing overseas. We can listen to any music from any era instantly. Meanwhile, in the…

Former FBI head James Comey was grumpy about being fired but he handled it well, at first. Then his boss took after him and publicly characterized the event in a way that Comey found offensive. So Comey ramped it up and disputed the account in an attempt to get his boss fired. Now they are involved in an angry tit for tat of mutual recrimination. Getting fired inspires you toward a higher degree of excellence, and it teaches you important lessons about getting overly attached to a single path for your career.In the private sector, this is not unusual but…

I was sitting at the Department of Motor Vehicles when I was tagged in a tweet from an Atlanta newspaper. “Atlanta could elect its first white mayor in 44 years,” it says. “Would the character of the city change?” I didn’t have enough information to say. In fact, I hadn’t even thought much about how a black mayor has actually shaped this city. How will a white mayor change things? Seems like it shouldn’t matter. And yet, race politics has been a huge factor in Atlanta’s history. No one wants to go back to the divided past.According to the linked…

Touching nothing, I can summon forth music from any era to fill up the room. I merely need to say aloud the name of any composer or performer of the last 500 years. I have a small device that listens and complies. It happens in an instant: the perfect performance with perfect sound. The whole experience takes my breath away. It seems too good to be true.Monteverdi! Done. Lady Gaga! Done. Tallis, Bieber, Josquin, Schubert, Frescobaldi, Joplin, Maynard Ferguson, Mahler! It’s all done by this astonishing little machine that streams music on command. Bach cantata number 20. Fantasy by Earth,…

Government, from time immemorial, has been bureaucratic, maddening, and often cruel. You can read about this in the ancient manuscripts. Chuang Tzu in the 4th century B.C., for example, wrote: “I would rather roam and idle about in a muddy ditch, at my own amusement, than to be put under the restraints that the ruler would impose.” Government has become our muddy ditch. Well, now you don’t have to make that choice. Government has become our muddy ditch. The reason is peculiar: we live in a digital age, when millions of providers are clamoring constantly for our attention, striving desperately to…

“Welcome to the beginning of a new era for American infrastructure,” said Vice President Mike Pence while introducing Donald Trump for a press conference. “Starting today,” Pence continued, “this president will take historic steps to keep his promise to rebuild America.” Wow, that’s some serious hoopla. Excited? Well, curb your enthusiasm. What’s happening is not awful, and it is probably even essential, but it marks no new era. It was a memo with a signature but has no force of law. Trump was announcing… what exactly? It was a memo with a signature but has no force of law. Still,…

In his speech withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, Donald Trump cited an econometric study by National Economic Research Associates. The study, which is both credible and alarming, speculated that meeting the emissions targets could cost 2.7 million jobs, with manufacturing hit particularly hard. Overall growth would suffer. To be sure, professional economists today (in contrast to 50 years ago) have doubts about such studies, and are quick to add enough caveats to cover their tracks. The authors of this one did so. To be “friendly” to “industry” is enough to discredit what you say.Yet you don’t even have to read…

It was December 12, 2015, when headlines in the world’s leading newspapers, in implausibly bold type, celebrated the “historic” agreement in Paris between all nations of the world to curb carbon emissions and thereby stop climate change: or so they said, as if elites get to say what is and is not historic. The spin, like the agreement itself, was crammed down our throats. Energy stocks weren’t affected in the slightest by the diplomatic agreement.I read the stories that day, and the next and the next, and the continuing coverage for weeks that nearly every reader – apart from a…

13 Reasons Why is a grueling emotional drama of how high school student Hannah Baker ends up taking her own life. The social scene at her school inflicts worsening wounds and ever-deepening pain. The school itself becomes associated with the torment of her heart and soul, as her peers drive her ever further into the pit of despair. The commercial scenes are few but they are universally safe, affirming, and happy. Life is not all grim. Her home is a respite. There are also three commercial settings that play an ameliorating role. Her father’s drug store is a happy place….

What exactly is the US military doing in Afghanistan? I’m hardly alone in wondering. The confusion is so widespread that opposition has bled into public indifference. After a decade and a half – six years longer than the US had troops in Vietnam – it’s just something we do. What we are doing and why is another matter. Initially, the invasion had something to do with finding those responsible for 9/11. After that, there was never a clear answer, and so people who care turn to conspiracy theory, and understandably so. Actually, Afghanistan has been on my mind much…

I first started writing before the Internet existed. We all wrote for an audience we mostly had to imagine in our minds. It seems as long ago as the War of the Roses.The only way to give an author feedback was to write a letter, put it in an envelope with an approved stamp, and give it to a government employee who would slog across the land and then drop it at the writer’s physical locale a week after he or she wrote the initial piece. People did it but not that often. Yes, I know there are people reading…

Why do we eat three meals per day? Why do we consume so many carbohydrates? Why do we think it is good to rise early? Why do we look down on morning drinking? At least the dogs seemed enormously happy. And where do we get the idea that pie is the greatest single American treat? I suspect much of this comes from our landed past. Eighty percent of us worked in agriculture and ranching in the early 19th century. Then everything changed; now only one percent of us do. It is now a highly specialized profession. So what’s it like…

There is a moment I found a bit startling in the new Anne of Green Gables series on Netflix. The farm is in trouble and the bank is talking foreclosure. The family starts to panic. Anne suggests that many people will chip in and help the family through these hard times. We should bring back the ethos and ethic of self reliance.The mother reacts with firmness and conviction: “Absolutely not. We do not accept charity.” How old fashioned! The statement alone reveals we are talking about the past here. I vaguely recall people in my own extended family – at…

The dollar exchange ratio of Bitcoin has finally topped $2,000. This is thanks in part to new international demand for the currency, due to the great ransomware panic of 2017. It appears that this was a catalyzing event to get BTC to the new level. The hackers demanded Bitcoin as payment for unlocking user files, and reportedly offered excellent customer service. Many people who had thus far eschewed Bitcoin were enticed into the ownership and exchange of this payment tool for the first time. The story reminds me of Bernard Mandeville’s theory that vice can nurse ingenuity. Do we not…

The new and fabulous re-telling of the medieval King Arthur legend – King Arthur Legend of the Sword – is faithful to the original, and it is very telling. The great myth of premodern thinking was that the King was the source and summit of all life, the decisive key to whether people eat or starve, live in peace or suffer in war, thrive or die, go to heaven or not. If this is true, it’s really important that the right dude sits on the throne. One Sword, One Ruler If there is a contest between two claimants to the throne,…

For 100 years, the US government has tracked the birth rate. It is now at historic lows. There are many reasons, but one has to do with the dramatic change in the way society regards the economic value of kids. To illustrate the point, let’s reflect on the continuing popularity of Anne of Green Gables, the 1908 book by Canadian writer Lucy M. Montgomery. Yes, it is charming, and ridiculously so. It’s beyond me why the new Netflix rendering (Anne with an E) is getting bad reviews. It’s probably because so many people are attached to the book and the…

Technology (“Hey Google, what’s the news?”) and the wildly entertaining events in the Beltway have turned me into something of a news hound. Last night, I was focused on finishing up my piece on neoliberalism for several hours, during which time I had noticed the latest earth-shaking revelations from the Belly of the Beast. Trump, despite every intention, has given the “mainstream media” a second and third life.The headlines were blaring yet again. Comey has a memo! He will soon tell all. Special prosecutor! I devoured these revelations. For me, this stuff has become more delightful than gaming, golfing, or…

The term “neoliberalism” is being flung around everywhere these days, usually with a haughty sense of “everyone knows what this is.” But do we really? You may think you know, but there’s very little agreement among everyone else. Is there a founding thinker, book, or meeting?Looking up the term on Google Trends reveals some interesting clues about what’s going on. Searches for the term have soared since late last year, racking up more searches than “libertarianism.” The most common search phrases are these: “definition neoliberalism,” “what is neoliberalism,” and “define neoliberalism.” The confusion is understandable. Sometimes the term is used…

In all the coverage of the recent ransomware attack shutting down computer systems around the world, one point has been buried and obscured. The focus has been on precisely who spread this horrid thing, what damage it has done, what to do once you have it, and how to prevent it. All fascinating questions. But an equally, if not more, important question is: who created this weapon of mass computer destruction? What was its origin? How did it get released in the first place? And here, the answer is as sure as it is alarming. The culpability belongs to the…

This frenzy even has a name: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Has the center-left ever been more apoplectic about a presidency? It can’t have been this nuts even during the Nixon presidency. Every day, their publications fill up with articles that are breathless to the point of hysteria about the disgrace that the Trump administration is bringing to the affairs of government. His incessant tweeting, his violations of protocol, his attacks on the press, and even the very existence of this administration has them in permanent meltdown. Here is an example. I’m leaving the over-the-top language from Charles Blow’s New York Times piece…

Like many people, I’m not crying that FBI director James Comey was fired from his job before his tenure was up. As Rand Paul has reported, Comey never stopped crawling to Capitol Hill for more money, more spying authority, more power to the government, and all those things I’m against. And like many people, I find the claims of Russian meddling in the election to be a diversion from the more obvious point that voters wanted change and didn’t want Hillary Clinton. The scenario is pretty clear: Trump leaned on a subordinate to provide cover for a decision he wanted…

I wanted to avail myself to beautiful bird song such as that which inspired the great composers. Vivaldi! Messiaen! What I got was a front-row seat to the state of nature, red in tooth and claw. Here’s how this calamity began. A friend got a bird feeder and filled it with seeds. Almost immediately, he was a hero to his friends, neighbors, and co-workers. What a generous thoughtful man! What a big heart he has for caring about the critters! Surely this indicates that he is a man of high character. He received a huge popularity boost for this act…

I’m just here for violence.” So read a sign by a man in New Orleans protesting the city’s decision to remove some marbled tributes to the Confederacy. This seems to be a growing tendency around the country. Is there a controversial speaker coming to campus? Let’s go and be disruptive or disrupt the disrupters. Is there a pro-Trump or anti-Trump rally happening? Let go and see if we can partake in some fisticuffs. Which side should we choose? That matters, but not as much as the appeal of the clash itself. Conflict, even violence, makes us feel alive. The longing…

Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) was one of the most erudite and widely educated thinkers to ever grace the world of libertarian ideas. God of the Machine (click that and you can get the entire book instantly for free) is her masterwork. Its contents have not been sufficiently absorbed into the current intellectual world. It is one of those lost treasures, a book that you begin and your whole world stops. It is wise. It is prophetic. It has stood the test of time. It first appeared in 1943 as the book that went against everything that the politics of the time were telling…

A parent was discussing her child’s obsession with home-made edible slime, feeling some relief that this trend had displaced the annoying bottle-flipping craze of early 2016. Unbeknownst to her, slime is about to be displaced in turn by the newest fashion: fidget spinning. In a mere three months, a high-end product became available for a penny. Unbelievable. Beautiful.What makes this one unique is that it has the wide demographic appeal of the model of all temporary fandoms: the brilliant pet rock itself. It is as likely to be seen in middle-school lunchrooms, if they haven’t already been banned, as on…

Can an institution have a heart and soul? In one sense, an institution is only as effective and meritorious as the people who run it. Still, a spirit can pervade an institution with a deep history and a long-lasting commitment to high ideals. This spirit can provide guidance in hard times, add influence in good times, and carry its managers, donors, and employees to new heights of achievement. The most modern technology is everywhere, all designed to get the message of freedom out to as many people as possibleThis thought occurred to me while sitting in the modern offices of…

The Republican-controlled House vote to “repeal Obamacare” – if that is what this was – was a stunning mess. Did they get it right? The answer is obviously no, and that’s inevitable. Just imagine a bill that sets out to reorganize any industry that is currently mostly market driven, such as shirts, software, groceries, or furniture. Would any bill coming from Congress that pertains to the whole of any of these be wonderful? It’s impossible. This is because the minds of politicians working together – with all their mixed motives of special-interest acquiescence, electoral fears, and general ignorance – cannot…

As life proceeds, you collect ever-more interesting observations about how things work: things you cannot fathom in youth but which you gradually come to realize later in life. People don’t tell you these things when you are young. What I’m going to tell you is supposed to remain proprietary information of people of middle age. But I don’t believe in proprietary information. Let’s just lay it all out. Five Bad Things No one is ever wrong. People will defend an opinion or an action until the end, even if every bit of logic and evidence runs contrary. Sincere apologies and…

All of us have wondered and worried about the astonishing amounts of private information we share with digital hubs. Google, Facebook, Apple, and so many others collect enough on all of us to enable identity theft, financial pillaging, blackmail, and worse. We know this, and it rightly troubles us. What should we do about it? Where is this heading? A movie on this subject sounds promising, especially one starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson. And yet The Circle might set records for bad reviews and low profitability. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 17% and it seems to be falling…

Ever wonder why state and local government can’t run billions and trillions in deficits and the federal government can? True, lower levels of government typically have rules in place that prevent it, but there’s more going on. What restrains them are the same forces that restrain corporations, small businesses, and even you from running up an endless amount of debt. It doesn’t matter how much you beg, if your creditor thinks you are a default risk, you are toast. Think about it from your own point of view. You have a house debt, a car debt, and your credit card…

Donald Trump’s tax plan seems to mark a new chapter in his presidency, from floundering around with strange and sometimes scary policies (bombings, border closings, saber rattling) to focusing on what actually matters and what can actually make the difference for the American people and the American economy. Under Trump’s plan, taxes on corporate profits go from 35% to 15%. They should be zero (like the Bahamas), but this is a good start. Taxes on capital gains go from 23.8% to 20%. Again, it should be zero (as with New Zealand), but it is a start. Rates for all individuals…

You can learn about morality from holy scripture, religious traditions, great philosophers, or a lifetime of varied experience. But you can also learn from implausible sources like popular movies. This happened to me. I learned something profound – a genuine intellectual revelation – from what is now one of my favorite movies. Or rather: this movie put together for me many themes I had read in the past but had not entirely framed up in my mind. Fantasy action flicks set in the Middle ages rarely feature simple acts of peaceful exchange. The movie is Dracula Untold (2014). It delighted me from…

Every living human being dreams of a flying car. Why? Is it the Jetsons? Is it the exhaustion from the traffic jams during which we look up and see the empty space and somehow know for sure that we should be there rather than glued to the black pavement? Is it just a romantic attachment to the idea that flying represents progress? Do we really need a machine that is both a car and a plane?Whatever, we can’t shake the sense that it is coming. But it is more complicated than it first appears. Does this thing require a runway?…

One possible gift to come from the mass bloodshed of 20th century totalitarianism: perhaps the history will serve as a lesson for the future. If that is to happen, however, we need to know the history, and not avoid it, much less deny it. To make sure we understand – that we care about what is in fact a historical abstraction for the current generation – increasingly falls to the filmmakers. This is the medium by which people today discover a past they did not experience. It is just too easy to look away. Few people travel to the nation’s capital…

It’s become routine. An outside lecturer like Charles Murray or FEE’s own Lawrence Reed is invited to lecture on campus, just to give a different perspective than students might be hearing in the classroom. It seems like the way academia is supposed to work: many ideas are presented as a contribution to a rich education and the student is given the tools to make up his or her own mind. The victors claim that the campus has been made safe again. But instead of a fair hearing, the invited lecturer is met with protests and gets shouted down. Aggressive and…

Showerheads used to be easy to hack. And never doubt the need to do so. What do we want out of a shower? We want fantastic amounts of water pouring down on our heads, ideally like the waterfall we see in movies and art. At very least, this requires pulling out the government-mandated flow stopper after the purchase and before the installation. In recent years, these stoppers have become more difficult to remove. Some are downright impossible. A few years ago, I bought an expensive showerhead and spent Saturday afternoon with hammers, ice picks, drills, and the experience ended in…

The reversals of promised policy from Candidate Trump to President Trump have people reeling. In fewer than 100 days, it’s happened in so many areas: Syria, Afghanistan, the promise to repeal Obamacare, the claim that China is a currency manipulator, relations with Russia, the value of NATO, the promise to get out of NAFTA, the supposed hiring freeze, the Ex-Im Bank, the re-hiring of Janet Yellen as the head of the Fed, the urgency of tax reform, and there’s many more coming, no doubt. Electioneering has little to do with governing results. Some reversals are welcome and some are not, depending…

The income tax is enshrined into law but it is an idea that stands in total contradiction to the driving force behind the American Revolution and the idea of freedom itself. We desperately need a serious national movement to get rid of it – not reform it, not replace it, not flatten it or refocus its sting from this group to that. It just needs to go. The great essayist Frank Chodorov once described the income tax as the root of all evil. His target was not the tax itself, but the principle behind it. Since its implementation in 1913,…

Easter was the beginning of a process of discerning a new reality in the world.Easter morning is filled with delight: bright colors, delicious foods, happy scenes of bunnies, and egg hunts. Above all, for those who are Christian, we are called to celebrate the joy of the resurrection of Christ from death to new life. The contrast between Good Friday and Easter could not be starker: with the quick turn of the calendar, we move from desperate sadness to unmitigated celebration. It was not this way in the ancient Christian liturgy. Easter was the beginning of a process of discerning…

Two years ago in Brazil, when I first addressed the Forum da Liberdad in Porto Alegre, the conference was already huge (3,500 people, as I recall) but spirits were low. The political system seemed hopelessly mired in corruption. Liberty-minded people did not see themselves as making progress. The country seemed stuck in an impoverishing socialism forever, an entrenched despotism as far as the eye could see, and people were asking: is there nothing we can do? Opportunity is in the air, and the realization feeds on itself. What a difference two years have made! Corruption hit the papers. Everything opened…

We are only a few years into the emergence of a new form of market freedom. In our highly regulated, static, and bureaucratized job marketplace, hobbled by a thicket of government rules and impositions, there appeared a beautiful thing. Sometimes called the gig economy, it specializes in using mobile apps and other software to directly connect producers and consumers. These new strategies have turned billions of previously idle physical and human resources into ones active in markets, to the great satisfaction of people, but much to the annoyance of governments and their connected labor unions. The gig economy has turned…

A friend of mine returned traumatized from an African safari. He could barely explain why he was so rattled, but it went something like this. These animals, they are so much better than us. They are stronger. Faster. Their senses are more finely tuned. They hear, smell, and sense things we do not. They are relentless and possess no sentiment. They are our masters. We are helpless in the face of them. It’s a miracle that we ended up on top, and it can only be for one reason: our rational faculties. It’s the only thing we have going for…

Folks, we’ve got a serious issue. The young generation has a genuinely dangerous substance abuse problem, particularly as it pertains to alcohol. No, this article is not a moralizing lecture. I’ve written before that this problem, which is egregious, is directly connected to the reality of legal prohibition. The strict drinking age regulation is not working. Government is not fixing the problem; it is making it worse. Then starts the abuse, and it is nothing like people of an older generation have ever seen.Think of what you imagine to be true of the interwar years of Prohibition in the US: the…

Today the US appears to stand on the brink of launching yet another major war, ostensibly out of moral outrage at what is happening in Syria, and allegedly for the sake of human rights, conducted with a completely unjustified sense of certainty that war will produce a better result than diplomacy, trade, and caution. The progress of freedom in those years ended on that day. The war sealed it.Today is also the date, 100 years ago, that the US entered the Great War, the war to end all wars, a war for freedom, self-determination, justice, morality, truth, democracy, and against…

A sign of strange times: 1984 by George Orwell has become a bestseller yet again. Here is a book distinguished for its dark view of the state, together with a genuine despair about what to do about it. Strangely, this view is held today by the Right, the Left, and even people who don’t think of themselves as loyal to either way. The whole fiasco happening in D.C. seems insoluble, and the inevitable is already taking place today as it did under the presidents who preceded Trump: the realization that the new guy in town is not going to solve…

Coding is a job you just can’t fake. Your stuff either works or it doesn’t. You can either do the job or you can’t. So ranking people according to skill is much easier. It’s a profession that is intensely competitive, and clearly not for everyone. I can remember so well sitting around the lunch table with some employees at Google’s headquarters. Forty-five minutes in, everyone started getting antsy to get back to work. In the blink of an eye, they disappeared to get back to their desks. They are profoundly aware that performance is everything, and other great performers are…

I’m thinking about the problem of disappearing frogs. Where do we stand with that? Well, Amphibians.org has the Disappearing Frog Project, a global effort to save the frog from the ravages of economic development. The latest update to this site was February 17, 2017, and if you go back a few years, you find scary news stories: American’s frogs and toads are disappearing fast, study warns. The source is the authoritative U.S. Geological Survey, no less. You can watch a show on how humankind has for 100,000 years been greeted with a “croaking lullaby” at night but thanks to the…

Why is Trump attacking the House Freedom Caucus? He has tweeted that “we must fight them.” My first thought: this is inevitable. Destiny is unfolding before our eyes! There is the obvious fact that the Freedom Caucus was the reason the GOP’s so-called replacement for Obamacare went down to defeat. They fought it for a solid reason: it would not have reduced premiums or deductibles, and it would not have increased access to a greater degree of choice in the health-insurance market. At minimum, any reform must unfreeze the market.These people knew this. How? Because there was not one word…

Exchange is part of life, even from the youngest age. At first, little kids fight over stuff and their parents have to settle it. But as they get older, perhaps after the age of 6 or so, they discover something wonderful. They can avoid punching and anger, trade with each other, and both parties come away happy. Exchange is never more wonderfully on display than the day after Halloween when the candy economy at school becomes most elaborate. My own earliest memories of trading involved, inevitably, marbles on the school playground. I just asked around the office. Every guy said…

A recent article pointed out that Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year. Shocking. It’s also shocking that governments can theoretically destroy all wealth in one year. That’s an unfathomable amount of wealth extraction, but it raises the question: what is the limit?Governments are quite literally all around us, even governments within governments. There is one in your town, one in your home, one in your office, another in your county, another in your state, and then there is the biggest one of all: the federal government. Around the globe, governments even get to together and…

Health care, taxes, education, foreign policy – everything needs to be reformed, and fast. The situation with Congress, however, is impossible. Every Democrat is dedicated to opposing anything put forward by the Republican majority. Within that majority, there are three or more factions, now testing their influence and even sinking legislation. Has there ever been a more daunting impasse? Elusive Consensus The aggrieved party can secede and build on another platform. This is not an uncommon problem in life. There are many things that require a consensus in order to be accomplished. Think of software, for example. Open-source platforms like WordPress…

When you bump into a story that warms your heart, brings a smile to your face, and helps you see the beauty in human life, you just have to share it. That is where I stand with this story. It is about Loraine Maurer of Evansville, Indiana. She is 94 and celebrating her 44th year working for McDonald’s. Even now she works the breakfast shift on Friday and Saturday mornings, waking up at 3am to get to work on time. After all, McDonald’s are America’s true community centers. “I have no interest in retiring,” she says. What a wonderful life….

One of the greatest errors made by opponents of free economies is to disparage and attack the idea of private capital. Without capital, production is only about immediate consumption, not about building for the future. You cannot have a complex economy with advanced technology, rising wages, and many stages of production, in the absence of capital, which requires security in private property. This is why even today you find very poor countries around the world. What has gone wrong? People are not lazy, unenterprising, uncreative, or unambitious. On the contrary, people in poor countries work harder and longer—even more creatively—than…

My hope is that this article will settle this nonsense once and for all. It won’t. Fake news outlets will persist as long as they are allowed to get away with it. It’s a smear and an outright lie but it goes on often, especially recently. The Background First of all, as you undoubtedly know, there is a faction within the House of Representatives gaining consciousness of the great task of our time: to get government out of the way of the productive forces of freedom, and to do this in every area of life. It is called the “Freedom…

Last week, I was honored to deliver a lecture as part of winning the Franz Cuhel Memorial Prize for Excellence in Economic Education, given as part of the Prague Conference on Political Economy sponsored by the CEVRO Institute. I was deeply humbled to receive this award. But the real reason I’m telling you this is to brag, of course, because, normally, there would be no reason you should care. Cuhel said that there are three stages to human decision making, and they sound rather awesome in German.And yet there is a reason you should care about Franz Cuhel, who lived…

You want to know why the “freedom caucus” has balked at passing the Trump-backed Ryancare health care proposal? Because the package does not address the core problem of the existing system. They are leaning – correctly – on a brilliant insight from F.A. Hayek. Let’s think this through. Objecting to Obamacare doesn’t have to be a matter of ideology. The contraption just didn’t work.What was the most fundamental problem with Obamacare? It attempted to set up an artificial market that lacked the most salient feature of markets: genuine competition. Real competition. I don’t mean teams struggling for control. I mean…

I was truly startled by the energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, and passion of the people who attended LibertyCon – sponsored by the European Students for Liberty – in Prague this year. I was honored to be a speaker, but especially excited to have my first exposure to a remarkable movement taking shape in Europe, one that is wholly dedicated to realizing liberty as the key to the future. It was liberty that built Europe and liberty that will save it from the authoritarians who are grasping to control its political and economic future. I saw among those one thousand attendees a…

In 1947, Leonard Read of FEE asked Ludwig von Mises to cumulate all his knowledge (gained from experience) of 20th-century political history into a single essay, one that dealt with all forms of state planning. The result was the single most sophisticated book on politics that Mises had written until that time of his life. It still holds up as a masterpiece, a piece you can read multiple times and still gain insight. Appearing two years before Human Action, Mises broadened his early critique of socialism to include fascism and Nazism and the conditions that led to their rise. It is…

“What about the poor?” An interviewer just asked me the question following my usual call for markets in everything. It’s probably the 100th time this has happened. The question amazes me because the implication behind it implies that markets serve primarily the rich. It’s hard to imagine a more profound confusion. The default state of the world is grueling poverty, universal insecurity, and short lives. When governments do come along, they nearly always serve themselves first. Capitalism made huge progress toward the conquest of poverty. The most earth-shattering change in this persistent trend of all recorded history came with the advent…

The Democratic leadership, and its leftwing intellectual base, are feeling implausibly smug these days. They figure it this way: the Trump era is going to inspire a blowback. Trump will make a terrible mess, destabilize income security and health care access, and skew social power in favor of fat cats, and all of this will make people angry. There will be no mass regret for turning away from social-democratic policies.Then the Left will hold all the cards. They will say: told ya so. They will tap into populist impulses with their own plan for greatness, tacking further Left than Obama…

Taco Bell recently had two great ideas that had nothing to do with its menu. It is opening a wedding chapel in its store in Las Vegas. And it is holding a competition called the “Love and Tacos” sweepstakes. The likely winner posted a photo that went viral of her wedding dress made of Taco Bell wrappers, to be announced on March 16. The entire ethos of Taco Bell has always been a bit churchy in the best way. Genius! Fast food thrives off genuine love for its brand, service, and product, without which it could never work. So this competition…

Most people are aware of the influence of Karl Marx and his ideological compatriots in building 20th-century totalitarianism. But there is another tradition of thought, dating from the early 19th century and continuing through the interwar period, that took a different route in coming to roughly the same conclusions regarding the place of the state in our lives. As opposed to Marx’s “left-Hegelians,” these thinkers are part of the “right-Hegelian” movement who dispensed with the universalism of Marx to applaud nation, race, and war as the essence of life. These thinkers loathed commercial society and capitalism in particular.These thinkers also…

It’s now clear where this “repeal and replace” thing is headed. A small cadre of the GOP House leadership hammered out a few tweaks of Obamacare in secret. All the essentials of Obamacare were left in place: the mandates, the regulations, the strictures, the entitlement expansions, the preset packages, and many taxes. The glorious reform had “lame” written all over it.The glorious reform had “lame” written all over it. A mandate with penalties paid to government is replaced with a mandate to pay insurance companies plus a refundable tax credit which might actually cost more in the future than the…

In the 6th century, Saint Isidore of Seville set out to write a book containing all human knowledge. That’s quite an ambition! The result was astonishing: 20 volumes with 448 chapters with the title Etymologiae. And talk about longevity. The book was a “bestseller” for 1,000 years. To put this in context, this would be like you turning to a book written in 1017 to find out what’s what. Let’s just say some information would be missing. The expertise of one person was fine, but now we can crowdsource and collaborate, creating a new form of expertise.After the printing press,…

Reading “How I Left the Left” is a solid reminder that there’s not much intellectual heft remaining on that side of the fence. If an ideology sets out to isolate the locus of evil in people’s very identity, it is pretty well spent. This, in addition to the failure of the socialist model everywhere it has tried, explains why the Left has suffered so much at the polls and now faces a serious backlash in campus and public life. Here we have a lineage of non-Marxist, non-leftist brand of rightist but still totalitarian thinking.With the failure of action comes reaction, and…

Last night, a man I admire asked me what I would have to drink. I said a martini and it was served. On my way out, I gave him a $10 bill. He said, “thank you; never turn down money.” We both got a laugh out of this because this has become our general rule. If he offers to pay, I will take it. If I offer to pay, he will take it. It’s a great rule because it keeps the peace. If you don’t want someone to take your money, don’t offer it. I forget now who first told…

“If God is so great, why did he make grapes and wheat instead of wine and bread?” The Rabbi asked the question as part of a wedding ceremony I attended this weekend. I already had the answer in my mind: because God wants us to work with our human hands. This was not the answer the Rabbi quoted from the Talmud. “Because God wants us to learn to cooperate with others in order to live better lives.” And it is true: no one person can perform well all the tasks that are necessary to turn grapes to wine and wheat…

What can a company do about trolls who use their technology to hurt the company and other consumers? It’s a tough problem for a technology company like Uber because anyone can download the app and summon a car and get picked up. Some of these accounts, inevitably, will belong to bad actors who are up to no good. Reputation data for individual users are fantastic, but there’s still the problem that users can make new accounts. What can you do? A primary use of the trick: prohibiting wicked sting operations. Several years ago, reveals the New York Times, Uber had…

Donald Trump said the following in his recent address to a joint session of Congress: To launch our national rebuilding, I will be asking the Congress to approve legislation that produces a $1 trillion investment in the infrastructure of the United States—financed through both public and private capital—creating millions of new jobs. This effort will be guided by two core principles: Buy American, and hire American. Barack Obama said the following in his 2011 State of the Union address: Our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped. …We have to do better. …So over the last…

It was the highlight of the Oscars: Auli’i Carvalho singing the hit song from Disney’s Moana. She performed with poise, power, and even perfection, showing a maturity beyond her 16 years. The quality of her voice seems perfect for this song, which is certainly the anthem of the hour, comparable only to the Frozen anthem from Disney’s last smash hit. The performance was wonderful and the music compelling but there is another reason why this song has become such a major hit: it is about a girl stuck in a central plan who can’t shake off the desire to follow…

The pronunciation in English is lay-say-fair. Its French origins date back to the late Renaissance. As the story goes, it was first used about the year 1680, a time when the nation-state was on the rise throughout Europe. The French finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, asked a merchant named M. Le Gendre what the state could do to promote industry. According to legend, the reply came: “Laissez-nous faire,” or “let it be.” This incident was reported in 1751 in the Journal Oeconomique by the free-trade champion Rene de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson. The slogan was codified finally in the words of Vincent…

For some 15 years, airport security has become steadily more invasive. There are ever more checkpoints, ever more requests for documents as you make your way from the airport entrance to the airplane. Passengers adapt to the new changes as they come. But my latest flight to Mexico, originating in Atlanta, presented all passengers with something I had never seen before. Like everyone else, I complied. What was my choice?We had already been through boarding pass checks, passport checks, scanners, and pat downs. At the gate, each passenger had already had their tickets scanned and we were all walking on…

One of my favorite characters from 20th century pop fiction is Roderick Spode, also known as Lord Sidcup, from the 1930s series Jeeves and Wooster by P.G. Wodehouse, and hilariously portrayed in the 1990s TV adaptation starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. He perfectly captures the bluster, blather, and preposterous intellectual conceit of the interwar aspiring dictator. Wodehouse created a composite and caricature of all would-be fascist dictators and turned it to hilarity.Back in the day, these people were all the same, whether George Lincoln Rockwell in the US, Oswald Mosley in the UK, or more well-known statesmen in interwar Europe….

The security lines at the Atlanta airport had grown progressively worse. The lines grew longer, the crowds ever more unruly, the invasiveness of the process ever more intense, the mood of the TSA more crabby and scary. Customers were miserable. It had been getting more terrible all the time, unsustainably so. Those of us who use this airport routinely even started using awkward hacks. I would ask Uber drivers to drop me off at the international terminal, which is vastly better because fewer people are there. Then I would ride the tram back to the main terminal. It made no…

A few months after my original article on “libertarian brutalism,” published by the Foundation for Economic Education, a very smart thinker named Robin Koerner reached out to me for an interview. It ended up being more of a discussion and then a co-led seminar. These interviews continued for three years. They have all been transcribed. You can download the full book here. Robin was just discovering the fullness of the liberal tradition and I was just coming to terms with some intellectual failures in our ranks, failures that I worried were going to cause problems down the line. The many…

Table of Contents Introduction by Jeffrey Tucker I. Threatening Libertarianism II. Liberalism, Liberty, Life and Love III. Creative Libertarianism Will Change Our Society IV. Fame and Fascism V. Henry George—The Most Important Economist You’ve Never Heard Of VI. Beauty is Truth; Truth is Beauty VII. The Great Minarchism vs. Anarchism “Debate” VIII. Jeffrey’s Two Big Performances at Freedom Fest Introduction The Upheaval and the Solution By Jeffrey Tucker A few months after my original article on “libertarian brutalism,” published by the Foundation for Economic Education, a very smart thinker named Robin Koerner reached out to me for an interview. It…

What a dear, sweet, brilliant, wonderful man! Michael Novak, born in 1933, died on February 18, 2017, and I miss his presence in the world so much already. He was such a fascinating figure, an adaptable mind with firm principles that put him on many different political sides over the course of a long career. But I think if you look carefully, you find a common thread in all his work: the desire to champion the dignity and freedom of the human person. And by that, I mean every person. Looking at the sweep of his life, you don’t find…

A piece of sea bass for $16 struck me as absurd. That’s too much! I bought it anyway. It was delicious. But I was still upset about the price. Nonetheless, the next day I decided to buy some more. “We sold out of that yesterday.” What can we conclude? I conclude that it was the right price after all. The market cleared. In any case, what gave me the idea that I knew it was too expensive? I bought it. The terms were right, since the buyer and seller agreed. After all, if the store could just charge anything it…

A few years ago, I bought some fresh eggs from a friend who owned chickens. They were wonderful. I’m not fussy about the topic so I can’t say that I go out of my way to get fresh eggs. I’ll take them when I can get them. However, I’ve long been intrigued by her instructions to me: “they do not need to be refrigerated.” Government tends toward mandating or forbidding in every area of life. This struck me as weird. I guess I thought they would spoil if they are left out or maybe gradually become a chicken or something. She…

I was amazed and thrilled to wake to a fascinating and in-depth NPR story on the brilliant Charlie Shrem, an early mover in the Bitcoin space who did time in federal prison for his innovations. In the prison where Charlie spent 18 months, the main currency was mackerel packed in cans.The story is actually fair and even affectionate, as it should be. Shrem was the first to implement a full-scale and highly successful money exchange service for Bitcoin at a time when hardly anyone else even believed that digital money could exist as a viable substitute for national money. It…

Navigating our chaotic world, we look for fixed principles to embed in our minds, lines we won’t cross that help give us self-definition and project onto others the right social messages. The practice makes life easier, less unmoored from meaning. We construct these markers in our minds in an effort to restrict possibilities within the infinite range of choice we face minute by minute. One thing I thought I knew for sure: I didn’t drink cheap domestics.But there is a danger: what if we make a mistake and adhere to the wrong principles? It happens. When the mistake becomes obvious,…

My elevator pitch for HBO’s The Young Pope series is: “A show in which the Catholic version of Trump becomes Pope and tries to impose a past he never experienced and knows nothing about.” The show is pretty interesting. And pretty weird.That’s not fully accurate but it gives the flavor. The Papal experience chronicled here is not populist but remote and revanchist. It shares the Rightist authoritarian bent that mirrors contemporary political trends in the US and Europe. The show is pretty interesting. And pretty weird. Jude Law stars as the Pope and Diane Keaton as the nun who serves…

The enduring power of Essentials of Economics is due to the persuasive power of economic logic itself. If it is done well, it applies in all times and places. And this book does economics extremely well. In times when economics is subject to vast political manipulation, when people have abused the science to push political agendas contrary to everything economics stands for, this book stands out as a clear, objective, and rational statement of the core of what economics teaches. In his outstanding introduction, Art Carden speaks of the scandal that it is not better known. He means, of course,…

“I wouldn’t take that trip to Brazil, if I were you.” Why? “What if you can’t back in the country?” This exchange with a friend took place when I said that I have several international trips coming up on my schedule. In response to his paranoia, I pointed out that this is an absurd fear. Mexico, Brazil, and the Czech Republic are not on Trump’s list. Plus, I’m an American citizen. There’s absolutely no question that I can leave the country and come back. And yet, I was slightly lying about my confidence here. The truth is that this fear…

When people first get interested in Bitcoin, it is usually as an investment and, possibly, as an alternative to nation-state monies of the world. It takes time and study but you eventually come to realize that there is a lot more potential to this technology. It all comes down to the Blockchain, which is the information storage and sharing technology that gives Bitcoin its value at all. And this ledger-based system – which belongs at once to everyone and no one – has a multiplicity of uses that could potentially eat into the exclusive domain of what are today considered within…

It’s being called the greatest Super Bowl in history: the only one to have run into overtime, the one with the most passing yards, the greatest point deficit ever overcome in any Super Bowl, and all adding up to a nail-biting conclusion that stunned the world. I would say the same thing about the jaw-dropping halftime show. Lady Gaga’s performance struck all the right notes, put her awesome talent on display, and illustrated the mighty power of technology and art in the digital age. I would even go further and say that the show contained a subversively true message: despite…

In our fast-changing world of seemingly infinite choice, unrelenting upheaval in technology, and growing demands on our time and attention, it can be a source of blessed solace to discover, as I have, a path towards stability and predictability, to cling to an object that imparts the assurance of something immutably inalterable, which is why I buy and wear only one style and color of sock. That sock is black, which, contrary to what you might have heard, goes with everything: blue, gray, or even tan suits: even jeans. My chosen sock is made of light wool, so I can…

Trump’s statement that, “I think we can cut regulation by 75%, maybe more” is hugely welcome. Plus, the Trump administration issued an executive order proclaiming: “whenever an executive department or agency (agency) publicly proposes for notice and comment or otherwise promulgates a new regulation, it shall identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed.” That looks pretty good on paper, though any clever deep-state dweller could easily find a rhetorical workaround. What kind of regulation does the Trump administration favor?But think about it. If an executive order really has the power to perform statutory miracles, why leave the door…

I just received a text from a friend in Australia. “What liberty conference in the United States should I attend this year?” Good timing! The answer is easy: FEEcon, June 15-18, 2017, Atlanta, Georgia. This is the first of what will be an annual event. In its first year, it will have 75 speakers, top thinkers, writers, artists, and filmmakers in the liberty space. There will be panels, speeches, and presentations on every aspect of human liberty. It’s happening at just the right time. For 71 years, FEE has done the essential intellectual work in defense of the free society….

“They are playing it straight!“ That was the first comment on the live stream as my interview with Ayn Rand went live, conducted 35 years after her death. Maybe people figured it was going to be satirical, but this would be impossible, at least for me. Jennifer Grossman of the Atlas Society made an excellent Rand, in her ideas, costume, and even accent. In order for me honestly to interview her, I had to suspend disbelief. As soon as Ms. Grossman proposed this, I saw the merit in the idea. Rand died in 1982 and too few today know her…

The wildly contentious election of 2016 seems to have inculcated certain habits of mind. We are tempted to believe that our role as citizens is like that of a sports fan. We need to choose a team and stick with it, no matter what. Our team needs us. If we lend our voices in support of the other guy, we are betraying our team. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. My friend is imperfect, but to admit this publicly is to weaken our side. It’s a test of loyalty. Therefore bring out the face paint, the jerseys, and…

For me, it’s all about The Jetsons, the cartoon of my childhood that permanently ingrained in me an image of what the future is supposed to look like. People were always talking to electronic machinery, telling what they want before having the wish granted. (You can download my book on this in epub.) This might explain my wild exuberance about my new Google Home, a machine I chose over Amazon’s Alexa simply because I wanted to try it. It has me as excited as any innovation since my first word processor saved me from befuddling my professors with my ghastly…

Tax outsourcing, but cut the capital gains tax. Tax imports, but repeal regulations on business. Restrict hiring from abroad, but free the labor market. Give more power to the police, but get the government off our backs. Crack down on illicit drugs, but liberalize health insurance. End senseless wars, but stop at nothing to smash Islamic radicalism. There was not a word in the inaugural address about cutting government.These are just some of the contradictory themes emerging in the Trump presidency. It’s not hard to spot the strange contradiction here. Some rely on more government power, and some less. And…

The work of John T. Flynn (1882–1964) is proof that the job of journalist once meant something very serious. As We Go Marching is a work of scholarship by any standard. It is well written, to be sure, but it covers the history and meaning of fascism with fantastic erudition, tracing its permutations from Italy to Germany to the United States. The passion is not disguised, but it is backed by incredible detail, relentless logic and powerful analytics. It is easy to identify this as Flynn’s greatest work, but actually there is some serious competition for that designation. Before the…

It’s like clockwork. When the price of Bitcoin (the dollar exchange rate) goes up, my inbox lights up. “What is Bitcoin and how can I buy it?” Then the price goes down, and it’s radio silence again, but for people who complain that their investment hasn’t panned out. Every new technology must enter our lives through real-time market experience. What’s going on here is the classic pattern. Non-specialists buy high (because of rising public attention) and sell, and then fail to buy low (because low prices don’t make the news). It’s no different with cryptocurrency than it is with any…

The media narrative on American politics has become so tedious you don’t have to listen anymore. Every story seems to follow a formula, and never more so on than on the Martin Luther King holiday. Every headline proclaims how black Americans are horrified at Trump’s insensitivity to the historical plight of blacks in the civil rights movement. After all, he attacked Rep. John Lewis, which apparently violates some canon of the civic religion. “It’s not even about race. Many blacks in this town live better than white people anywhere in the world. But there’s whole communities that have been forgotten.”…

There are several passages in Gustav Mahler’s first symphony that are surprisingly dramatic but extremely difficult to perform. They occur right at the end of sections when the tempo picks up quickly and rushes to a sudden ending. The players must develop an internal sense of pacing and it must be coordinated across all sections. Timing is the problem. It can’t be done by the conductor alone. No hand waving causes it to happen. The players must develop an internal sense of pacing and it must be coordinated across all sections. One person with a different sense ruins the effect….

What is the relationship between ideas and social change? It’s a gigantic question that has spawned a vast literature with nothing approaching a consensus. This is for a reason. Ideas are not like physical property. They do not have to be rationed because they do not have the properties that make for economic scarcity. Their distribution does not follow a predictable, manageable, traceable production structure. What happens in some times, places, and issues does not seem to happen in others. It’s for this reason that every contribution to this debate seems partially right and partially wrong. Why is this important?…

It began to dawn on me about 15 minutes into Sing that this is a movie I’ve waited for all my life. It inspired laughing, cheering, crying, and a feeling of total joy, and why? It’s because the film is a parable about our lives in the way we live them. It’s about people feeling undervalued in their daily lives and how one daring entrepreneur created a venue to help people realize their dreams. Think of it. Here we have super-talented, singing, anthropomorphic animals who love life and dream of achieving great things through art. There is a struggling theater…

I was enjoying “The Crown” on Netflix for the intimate look at the early reign of Queen Elizabeth II in postwar England. Absolutely fascinating. I was on the verge of bingeing it to the end. My own mental image of him is sitting on a throne in silly clothes, surrounded by court musicians playing froufrou music.But wait, what’s this? A new series just appeared on Netflix called “Versailles.” It covers the beginnings of the 17th century reign of King Louis XIV, the famed “Sun King,” he of long hair, high heels, decadent art, and the most preposterous display of aristocratic…

It came out in passing last night, in discussions with a smart 17-year old, that he got in deep trouble in middle school. He was accused of loan sharking, and forced to do detention. See if you think there is anything wrong with what he did. They condemn what they do not understand.The middle school cafeteria had candy machines. Every candy cost a dollar. My friend carried extra ones with him. He would buy candy, and immediately people would ask if he could loan them money. He did. More and more people asked. He continued to loan people money and…

Free speech is one of the most settled principles of law and public policy, or so you might think. We recoil at censorships of the past. We acknowledge the freedom to speak as an essential human right. We are taught the legend and lore of the struggle for it in all our years in school. And all of this is fine … until it is actually exercised, as it is moment by moment today, thanks to the mass distribution of communication technology. We are finally getting what we always wanted – the universal right and opportunity to reach the universe…

Online commerce is trending toward 10 percent of all retail, and it is growing rapidly. We click and pay, and, if it’s not a digital good, the good arrives at our home a day or two later. Hardly anyone remembers “allow six to eight weeks for delivery.” Everything comes fast. And if it isn’t in stock, we are notified. When it is shipped, we are notified. We can track our packages online, following them stop by stop. The warehouse has been a feature of the commercial world since the most ancient times.The goods go straight from the manufacturer to the…

The unending process of getting history online has produced vast revelations. The latest discovery to amaze me is an article by Russian communist Leon Trotsky from 1934, as printed in the publication Liberty: “If America Should Go Communist.” Trotsky’s 1934 article exudes confidence in how communism could be realized in the United States. Trotsky, beloved then and now as the Menshevik and later Bolshevik leader, wrote this document in a period in his life in which he was massively popular among American intelligentsia. He had lived in New York for three months in 1917, and established some strong and enduring…

It was the second week of February 2013 when I first ventured a public opinion that Bitcoin is the real deal. The dollar exchange rate was at $25, on its way toward another run-up and crash that had been the pattern for two years. How can you create money out of computer code? That struck me as absurd.I had just returned from a conference where some Bitcoiners surrounded me and force-fed me the information I needed to know. It would take another two months before I wrapped my brain around it enough to be able to write an article. But…

Even I, who have been writing about terrible American showers for 10 years, was shocked with delight at the shower in Brazil. Now, here we have a socialist country and an entire population that grouses about how hard it is to get ahead. And yet, step into the shower and you have a glorious capitalist experience. Hot water, really hot, pours down on you like a mighty and unending waterfall, sort of like it used to sea to shining sea. At least the socialists in Brazil knew better than to destroy such an essential of civilized life. By efficiency, the…

Have you had this happen to you? The topic of racism comes up in casual conversation. Some white person defensively says that he has black friends. He is immediately (and implausibly) denounced. The thinking is that the claim that “some of my best friends are black” is an old canard to cover up…racism. The accused stands there humiliated, stripped bare, seeming to have affirmed his own evil with the invocation of a simple and common-sense point. The claim that having black friends is a lame excuse – and even evidence of racism – came up in MTV’s recent video: White Guy…

No presidency in my lifetime was greeted with such enthusiasm and unhinged hope as that of Barack Obama. At the start of his first term, a cult-like following had already developed among the intellectual and media elite. It was the dawn of a new age, marked by exuberant anticipation of justice, fairness, equality, peace, and sea-to-shining-sea happiness, all of it predicted as a certainty once you consider the sheer intelligence, erudition, and good intentions of the great man. Salon sums up the Obama era thusly: Obama campaigned on hope in 2008 and it helped turn out a large and diverse electorate,…

Some years ago, back when people sent mail, a letter arrived in my mailbox with a return address of Buffalo, New York. It was from my friend Ralph Raico (1936-2016), the famed historian of liberalism who died recently. I wondered what this nonbeliever would send me at Christmas time. He called himself a “free-thinker,” but he also knew of my own theism to which I assumed he objected profoundly. How would this man, raised a Catholic but now an atheist, deal with this? He was the leading historian of liberalism of his day.I opened the envelope to find the most…

You got a problem with Facebook? Go ahead. Think of what it is. Say it loud and proud. It is probably one of the one thousand or so common complaints listed at the book-length Wikipedia page: Criticism of Facebook. It’s been heard before. A thousand times. You get the impression that this must be the most hated company in the history of humanity.Every hour, every minute, Facebook stands accused of promoting fake news, swaying whole elections, suppressing news, spying on your face, mining your data, causing divorce, wrecking the meaning of friendship, displaying nudity and not displaying nudity, censoring…

One reason that the Brothers Grimm fairy tales have such appeal — more so than the folklore that came before — is that they deal with a world that is familiar to us, a world that was just being invented in the early 19th century, when these stories were first printed and circulated. They deal with people, scenes and events that affect what we call the middle class today, or the bourgeoisie. This was the world that serves as the backdrop to the tales of the Brothers Grimm. A great example of this is the very short story called “The…

It’s a time of dramatic social change, and this is destabilizing all politics, even birthing a new world. The aristocracy is losing power to a new commercial class of innovators. The new creed is not to rule, but to serve. To be royal once meant to run the world, but no more. The royals now are out of money and they turn to the new wealth of a class of creatures who have seized on new technologies. These new technologies have, in turn, created new opportunities for unprecedented ways of making money. Instead of making things, these people are providing…

Delirium is what I felt watching Moana, the 56th animated epic by Disney about a Polynesian tribe’s struggle to survive and the young girl (not a princess, she keeps saying) who leads them out of crisis. It is so stunningly beautiful, compelling, and moving. Animation has never looked this great, and the story is gripping from beginning to end. Moana gives us the right kind of multiculturalism.It also offers that special thing I look for in movies: a narrative that sets me off thinking about issues of political economy. More on that in a bit. I’m delighted to find that…

For the eternal 18 months of the presidential election of 2016, the critics of Donald Trump, myself included, said he campaigned as a would-be authoritarian. The term peaked in search, according to Google trends, along with the term “fascism.” Ron Paul and I, along with many others, called it out as early as July 2015, and, as the campaign intensified, we came to share this criticism with much of the mainstream media, which rallied around this view as the most effective criticism of Trump. We all found ourselves in the implausible situation of agreeing with critics with whom we had…

Regular readers of FEE know that one of our beats has been the early history of the administrative State as built by Progressives at the turn of the 20th century. It was a different kind of State than the one that came before, a modern state knew no limits to its power to intervene in the relationships between individuals. It set in motion a century of government growth and regulatory control over every aspect of life, and all these controls have lasted to this day. Why did they do it? The textbooks say that they loved the common man. They…

A friend of mine described what is was like for her to discover the meaning and implications of economic liberty in the world. Before, most of her formal education put down enterprise, business, corporations, and wealth creation, talking only about their downsides. The world was dark, with the monsters of exploitation, pollution, and inequality lurking around every corner. But learning economics changed all that. Suddenly she saw that the consumer products all around her are not given by nature; they were created through a process that involved an amazing human drama of risk and reward. Within the commercial sector we…

A dark cloud is hanging over the lives of freedom lovers these days. It seems all the news is bad. It’s hard to take. And the personal anxiety it causes, it’s just too much. Every day we are being buffeted about bad ideas coming from the left, from the right, and back again. And contest is dragging down the prospects for freedom itself. We can’t sit on the sidelines and just watch this with the view that we cannot change things.If you look at Cato’s latest report on human freedom around the world, you see the proof. Freedom is actually…

I laughed, danced, sang, and kept a smile on my face for the better part of the 90-minute movie Trolls, and left the theater saying it was an animated version of Atlas Shrugged. Just kidding. Except that later I realized that I was not kidding. Here is a film that makes the salient point: our happiness comes not from some external source, and certainly not from a powerful leader who purports to feed it to us, however much a leader claims otherwise. Happiness comes from within us. It is our choice whether or not to conjure it up. The message…

Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably waste your time, annoy you and attack your dignity, and finally just prove to be totally ineffective at accomplishing the task, there’s a good chance that it involves the government. This is one of the most persistent and yet least acknowledged features of modern life. At best, government does necessary things poorly.There is a certain cast of mind at work here. I’ve written that government as we know…

I have no idea whether the restaurateur Andrew Puzder will be a good Labor Secretary. I will say that it is a huge but much-welcome departure from tradition that the Labor Secretary possess actual knowledge and experience in hiring workers and dealing with the biggest obstacle to job growth today, which is the agency he has been tapped to head. Clutch those pearls hard, Times writers. Some modicum of worker freedom might stand a chance.But if Puzder is not successful, it will not because of the reasons the New York Times cites in a stunningly bad editorial. The article contains…

Ben Carson, a physician and conservative pundit, has been tapped to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where offices are waiting for him and his new staff – plush offices that hold transient political employees which the permanent staff, ensconced in grim offices through the rest of this concrete monstrosity, is habituated to ignore completely. The new big shots will sit at their desks until they are called by the media to comment on housing policy. They will suggest many changes, no question. Carson is highly skeptical of the federal role in housing and might even attempt to…

I was out shopping for a sweater this weekend and I ran into Donald Trump, who told me that I should stop outsourcing my job. “You should be knitting your own sweaters.” I explained that I’m not very good at knitting. I have other things to do, in any case. This whole idea strikes me as a huge waste of time. I just can’t see myself sitting at home doing knitting. It’s true that this would give me a job, but it is not a job I want, especially since someone else wants to do it for me. But he…

Let the market decide. Those four words are among the most revolutionary in the history of humankind. To let the market decide means deferring to the results even if we personally wish something else would happen.At first the market might look like a series of signs and indicators on a scoreboard. But behind the numbers and balance sheets lie human values, indicators on the map that people use to navigate their way out of the state of nature. By the market, we do not mean some depersonalized force floating above and outside of our lives. We really mean the choices…

It’s all over the headlines. Trump must abandon his business interests, otherwise he might use his new power in corrupt ways. And so he must build a wall between business and public service. For his part, he has sworn to clean up Washington, i.e. drain the swamp, because the whole regime is obviously corrupt. Indeed, the election itself became a fight over who is more corrupt, with daily revelations about conflicts of interests, cover-ups and lies, accusations and denials, promises of jail time, and so on. Ever since there was government, there have been those want to purify it from…

Johannes Brahms is regarded as one of the greatest composers in history. I never tire of his sonatas for violin or cello, and his piano works are pure magic. I go through whole periods of listening and marveling at his capacity for melodic development. I can’t read enough biographies. Beyond his incurable love for Clara Schumann – I’m convinced his over-the-top adoration of her acted like a narcotic that fired up his creativity to generate such astonishing melodies – one strange fact stands out to me. The code is not a mandate, but a statement of a common practice in…

The apologists for centralized regulation of economic life sometimes seem to be engaged in a kind of self parody. For example, the New York Times editorial condemning the judge who stopped the imposition of new overtime rules runs as follows: “If all had gone according to plan, as many as 4.2 million additional workers in the United States would have started earning time and a half for overtime, effective Dec. 1. But that plan, developed by the Obama administration’s Labor Department in an exemplary rule-making process over the past two years, was blocked on Tuesday by a federal judge in…

I’ve finished Thanksgiving leftovers and I’m digging into a store-bought blueberry pie, because few people have time to make such a pie from scratch. Crust should be made from flour and lard (which comes from pig), in my view, but when you buy from the store, the crust is almost always made from “shortening” which is a vegetable product. Meaning: corn. Then there is the pie filling. Usually at home, you would use sugar from cane to sweeten the berries. But when you buy from the store, the berries are sweetened from a syrup made also from corn. Why does…

Fidel Castro has died at the age of 90, and, by chance, I had just seen the wonderful 2015 movie “Papa” about Ernest Hemingway’s years in Cuba before the revolution. The backdrop of the movie is pre-Castro Cuba, a struggling but prospering land lorded over by the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973). It is the first Hollywood movie to be filmed on site since the Cuban Revolution. The slogan of the revolution was “freedom or death,” and Castro was its leader.The movie sought to recreate the year 1959. Ironically, that was not hard to do. Most films set 50-plus years…

It’s celebration season, so time to break out the Champagne! Except you might not. You have a choice over a huge variety of bubbly wines now. Thank the market. For hundreds of years, the bubbly white wine made in the Champagne region of France has held a monopoly. It is a monopoly on a word. In most parts of the world, by government decree, you can’t call your Champagne “Champagne” unless it is actually from Champagne and it is made with the official Champagne method defined by the French government. The rule, which dates from the late 19th century, is…

Only days before the enforcement was to begin, Texas federal judge Amos L. Mazzant III has blocked the imposition of the Obama administration’s egregious overtime regulations that have already had a terrible effect on American businesses and workers. It’s just a change in one number, but it profoundly affected millions of lives.Break out the Prosecco! It’s a much-welcome reversal of a long-running trend toward ever more control over people’s work lives. The judge said, essentially, that the Department of Labor did not have the authority to issue these regulations. It had no mandate from Congress to do what it did….

Now this is very interesting. The president-elect in a transition might normally address the American people through network television. This is how it has normally been done. Donald Trump took another path. His transition team snagged a free YouTube channel, set up a camera, and pushed out a 2-and-a-half minute video on his transition priorities (which didn’t include health care, by the way). It’s had a million views in less than 24 hours. Equipotency is the greatest gift of the market to humanity, the result of thousands of years of social evolution, arriving ever more to a perfect state of…

There’s a Subway restaurant across the street. The lady next to me is reading a biography of Michael Jordan. The band is playing covers of Lady Gaga songs. The bar patrons are drinking Miller beer. I alone seem to prefer the national cocktail, the caipirinha made from a sugar-cane rum called cachaça, a dangerously good liquor that is hard to find in the US. As with the United States, Brazil recently went through a gigantic political upheaval.I’m in Santa Maria, Brazil, a small town three-hours south of Porto Alegre. What they are eating, however, is much more wonderful than what…

Historians of science would call this moment “pre-paradigmatic.” One paradigm has failed. A new one has yet to emerge. There is a struggle for dominance in politics, culture, and ideas. The result is an air of confusion. You sense it. It is precisely in times like these that people are looking for a new way. There have never been more opportunities for reaching people with ideas that are essential to this mission.What happens going forward is going to depend on the ideas that are familiar and credible in the public mind. For people who value freedom, cherish human flourishing, and…

In the floods of commentary following the election, a gigantic factor is being underreported. Obamacare blew up in the weeks before the vote. It’s one of the great ironies of history that the legislation was called the “Affordable Care Act.” Once it was implemented, we saw several years of sharp increases in premiums, sometimes as much as 50% per year. Insurers sent out millions of notices, just before the election, of coming increases between 20% and 90% starting January 1, 2017. Keep in mind that people are forced to pay these charges. And often people are afraid to actually use…

It’s remarkable how much time we spend reflecting on toxic personalities and working to get away from them, even as we are surrounded on all sides by a toxic government we can’t seem to get away from. We are wrongly reluctant to apply normal standards of ethical behavior – ones we accept in our private lives – to the relationship between society and the state. We are constantly giving this toxic actor a pass.

The nation’s system of healthcare delivery experienced an accelerated dissolution during an election year, profoundly affecting the lives of everyone but the very rich. Even if you knew nothing else about the campaign or the candidates, you would have to predict that this would have major repercussions.

What lies in ruins here is not common decency and morality – much less the character of a whole people and nation – but rather an anachronistic, arrogant, entitled, smug, conceited ruling elite and paradigm. You can see this in the clues that show that the vote was not so much for a particular vision of one man, but against a prevailing model of managing the world.

On June 17, 1971 – nearly half a century ago! – President Richard Nixon held a press conference that announced a new war on drugs. It was to be a global war involving 9 agencies of government, nonstop guns and interdictions, courtrooms and jails, and many billions of dollars in spending. Most of the energy was spent fighting a green plant, marijuana, that not only did not disappear; it has since become a staple of life for millions of people, both medicinally and recreationally. The world can be free. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.There is no question that pot was…

What is your view of how society works? It matters. You have to decide. You might notice that your view on the question depends on the setting. If you go to the mall, the local bar, a bustling restaurant, a neighborhood cookout, a house of worship, a movie theater, a concert, or even a sports event, you will see signs of blessed harmony. The larger the state grows, the more it invades the peaceful areas of our lives. Here, for the most part, people get along. No one is gouging each other’s eyes out or calling people enemies of the…

Talk to business owners about “kids these days” and you will get a wicked earful of epithets. Whatever happened to the work ethic? The answer to that question is not found in some strange corruption of the soul that has taken place in recent years, though that might be the result. The real issue has very practical roots. No Prior Experience Young people often enter the workforce following school with no previous job experience in a commercial space. There are high costs to this reality. They lack essential formation in what it means to be truly valuable to others. You…

The Washington Post ran a beautiful photo montage of children at work from 100 years ago. I get it. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be horrifying. I’m looking at these kids. They are scruffy, dirty, and tired. No question. But I also think about their inner lives. They are working in the adult world, surrounded by cool bustling things and new technology. They are on the streets, in the factories, in the mines, with adults and with peers, learning and doing. They are being valued for what they do, which is to say being valued as…

We celebrate modern inventors for improving our lives. But what about those one thousand years ago who laid the very technological foundation of civilization as we know it? They too served the world. Since ancient times, the teaching of music had been done by a tiny and arrogant cartel of masters.In the first millennium AD, no one could figure out a reliable way to transmit musical ideas except by singing and playing them to each other in person. In the second millennium, a way emerged: the printed musical staff. It was a form of technology and it laid the foundation…

A few months back, I was invited to a house party for just a few people. I arrived and engaged the hosts with the most charm I could muster. The evening ended and all was well, until I suddenly remembered my manners. I didn’t bring a gift. Not wine, not beer, not chocolate. I arrived completely empty-handed. I was mortified. The gentleman who arrives with a gift to offer is known for his thoughtfulness and generosity.My faux pas prompted me to think of how others handle this old-fashioned custom that is not well-practiced anymore. I thought of a man of…

Do you remember when you were first eligible to vote? An adult, a citizen, at last! Finally the power to exercise influence over public affairs in the most direct way. So I voted. Then the returns came in. My guy won anyway, overwhelmingly. I didn’t feel vindicated. I immediately realized that my vote meant nothing. I wasted my time. I felt like a chump, and never voted again. I’ve never had a reason. I watch politics like a spectator sport, just to see what happens. To be sure, I never bought the claim that my non-voting was unpatriotic. I still…

The presidential debate, because of the exclusion of Gary Johnson though he should be on stage, will feature two authoritarian visions. This is not a choice any free person should tolerate. I continue to return to the great 1927 book by Ludwig von Mises: Liberalism. Here is the last and most sophisticated statement in defense of freedom written just before the world blew up in flames at the hands of totalitarian states. It’s a beautiful day to download it and read it. It is so relieving. We are today so far from this large vision that it is tempting to…

It’s customary in politics to tout a candidate’s experience in government. As a bystander, I’ve never been impressed. What mattered to me were his or her ideas for the future. It’s a candidate’s vision for what government should and should not do that determined my enthusiasm for the campaign. Plus, I’m not looking for a well-run government. I’m looking to get rid of the whole mess. And yet, this season of politics seem to be adding some nuance to that simple point. When you listen to Trump, for example, he talks about the country as a whole as if it…

For forty years, the Libertarian Party has worked to survive. Then, in what seems to be a brief flash of time, it is suddenly at the center of American political life. It’s absolutely remarkable how quickly this has happened. It’s a perfect storm that made this happen. Party A has become a plastic vessel for pillaging pressure groups, with a phony at the top of the ticket. Party B has been taken over by a cartoonish replica of an interwar strongman. Like beautiful poetry, or like the third act of a 19th century opera, the Libertarian Party has risen to…

It’s no secret that human liberty is in grave danger, perhaps more than any time in generations. Look at whom the two parties are offering up to rule us! It’s a coin toss which will be worse for economic and social liberty, to say nothing of war and peace. This can’t end well. You can despair and hide. Or you can do something about it. Two years ago, Liberty.me blasted into popular culture as a creative venue for living a freer life. We’ve built a beautiful platform for meeting, publishing, sharing, reading, studying, and inspiring each other. It’s revolutionary but…

Two years ago, Liberty.me started a bold experiment in community organizing. This new domain and website became a portal for people who share the idea that the world should be free. We made a library, beautiful guides to practical issues, forums to keep the conversation going, member chat, and a full friendship network. There was even more: live shows, a publishing platform, a podcasting network! It’s been a wild and wonderful ride. And we’ve had so much support! From the very beginning, Liberty.me attracted a wide range of donations. In fact, this site had one of the most successful crowdfunding…

Hooray for John Stossel! He has dedicated two issues of his wonderful show on Fox Business to hosting a debate between Libertarian Party aspirants to the presidency. The format is great. The questions in part one were solid. https://youtu.be/Iib0nyobUQM John does an excellent job. And the candidates were fascinating to watch. Within the LP itself, this really is a contest this year. It’s probable that Gary Johnson will get the nomination. He is the current favorite. But it could fall to John McAfee or even Austin Petersen. Already, the Libertarian Party has garnered more public attention at this point in…

Do I even need to tell you that Zootopia is a wonderful movie? Of course it is. There is a reason it is wildly successful. It is hilarious, touching, memorable, and, as “kids’ movies” tend to be, surreptitiously sophisticated. Disney has mastered the art of using animation and fantasy worlds to reveal truths about our own world. This company has been doing this for several generations. Sometimes these truths are too uncomfortable to put in live action and are better conveyed in cartoons. In both its plot and its lessons, Zootopia is right on top of the moment. On the…

Because some people just read the headline, let me be clear: I loathe Trump’s politics. I’m completely against him. That out of way, let’s deepen our analysis. Imagine if the next president, when he takes office, immediately makes history as the most unpopular president ever, not just in the US but all over the entire world. Imagine 90% of the world’s population allied against the world’s most powerful man. That could make an impression. Imagine that very election was a fluke, a result of a divided opposition and a unified but fanatical minority, paired against a deeply unpopular establishment opponent,…

People tour the nation’s capital to be delighted by symbols of America’s greatness and history. They seek out monuments and museums that pay tribute to the nation state and its works. They want to think about the epic struggles of the past, and how mighty leaders confronted and vanquished enemies at home and abroad. But what if there was a monument that took a different tack? Instead of celebrating power, it counseled against its abuses. Instead of celebrating the state and its works, it showed how these can become ruses to deceive and destroy. Instead of celebrating nationalist songs, symbols,…

To understand the frustrations, even despair, of the twenty somethings, you could cite vast data on unemployment, low wages, shattered friend networks, boomerang living arrangements, and frustrated hopes. In this respect, millennials are suffering more than any other age group, losing jobs even as every other age group is gaining them. Or you could just turn on the radio and hear it from yourself. Reflect, for example, on this line from a song rising in the charts right now: “Out of student loans and treehouse homes we all would take the latter.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXRviuL6vMY Treehouses? They are charming, the stuff of…

In the days leading up to the 11th Republican debate, the voice of panic and fear over the rise of Trump grew to a deafening pitch. The grim reality has finally set in: this guy could be the world’s most powerful man, with his finger on the nuclear bomb, the lord of the surveillance state, the ruler of the world’s largest regulatory regime, the head of the largest apparatus ever constructed for controlling the largest number of people in the history of the world. Elected by the people! The escape routes for avoiding his rule — a man who cannot…

From the floor at Students for Liberty. Jeffrey Tucker and Robin Koerner discuss minarchism vs. anarchism. Two great minds engaged in epic debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFWdjaSLlR4 Podcast Version on Liberty.me Studio For more great libertarian videos, check out the Jason Stapleton Program. For more Robin Koerner, head over to the Blue Republican. For more Jeffrey Tucker, you’re already in the right place — Liberty.me.

Freedom lovers everywhere are biting their nails this election season, wondering how the damage can be limited. Depending on who gains control, we could have trade wars, nationalized health care, the pillaging of Wall Street, more war in the Middle East, a VAT tax, direct surveillance of your smartphone, internment camps, mass deportations, and so on. But let’s take a step back and ask whether it has to be this way. What if the power of government were so limited that it didn’t matter who occupied the White House? This would be a vast improvement. Let’s say that Rutherford B….

I was having a nice discussion with the man behind the counter at the firing range. He was surrounded by semi-automatic weapons, and hundreds of handguns in the case that separated us. I used the opportunity to tap into his expertise, mostly because I don’t keep up with the gun issue enough. He explained to me the absurdity of the ban on automatic weapons, how and why it is that there is really no such thing as an “assault rifle,” a bit about size of allowable magazine sizes. He pointed out, in particular, Clinton’s support of an assault rifle ban…

A defeat of the establishment! Surely that is wonderful news. The prevailing political (and government in general) system has indeed failed, and that failure is more obvious than ever. The system is run for them and not us. Down with the ruling class! Up with the outsiders who are determined to overthrow the status quo! At any point in my life, I would have celebrated. But there’s a slight problem. Actually it is a big problem. Neither Trump nor Sanders favor a genuine alternative to an establishment-run administrative system of all-intrusive state power. Both favor a dramatic expansion of the…

Grace and elegance: those are the two words that best characterize the moment Rand Paul dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination. There was no feeling of loss, much less tragedy. It was a good run and he made his points, and rose above the clamor. The voters, in a different mood this season, weren’t buying it. Republicans — the activists still remaining in the party — don’t want to hear about the blowback of U.S. foreign policy, don’t want to hear about the injustice of “criminal justice,” and don’t even want to hear about cutting government. It’s…

How quickly the tide turns! Trump was the candidate who defied every dismissal, confounded every expert, stunned every prognosticator. He moved from strength to strength, rising in every poll from July 2015 to January 2016. His crazy insults, his wacky statements, his egregious manners, his outrageous smears, his made-up scenarios of national suicide — none of it seemed to harm him. He believed in himself and his followers believed in him. There was always an element of a Ponzi scheme about the whole campaign: lifted higher and higher through confidence alone. He didn’t have a serious organization, no get-out-the-vote plans,…

The polls didn’t forecast well after all. Trump was ahead by as much as 10 points in the polls going into the vote. He lost Iowa to Cruz by a substantial margin. Late in the evening, he played it like Pee Wee Herman when he fell off his bike: “I meant to do that.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJXU7EVXs2A But even for Trump, this fib was too much. He was on record earlier than day predicting a clean sweep. After all, the polls that he has made his campaign centerpiece said it would happen. So much of Trump’s campaign has been based on illusion….

I’ve now been ice skating three times in so many weeks, and I’m completely hooked. I’ve even bought my own skates! Yay! Why is ice skating so fun? Here’s a problem: it is not fun when you are just beginning. In fact, it is miserable. Most of our lives, we walk around on solid shoes on solid ground and it suits us just fine. Our feet are on the floor. Or we run and that can be fun. In either regular walking or running, there is no question of balance or falling or disorientation. Why do we strap on these…

Oscar Wilde was rehearsing a play one year, keeping grueling hours, all the way up to Christmas Eve. He showed no signs of letting up that night. Finally, one of the actors asked him, “Oscar, do you not recognize Christian holidays?” He paused and replied: “the only feast on the liturgical calendar I recognize is Septuagesima.” It’s a funny statement because of the seeming obscurity of the term. Typical erudition. And yet, the term was once not so obscure. The revamping of the calendar in the 1960s took it away. Tragedy there. The day marks the lead up to Lent….

At last, cracks in America’s draconian drinking-age edifice are starting to appear. A movement is developing that would make US law like most other civilized countries in the world. New Hampshire is considering legislation that would allow people 18 and older to consume wine and beer (but not liquor) in a public, commercial establishment, as long as they are accompanied by someone over 21. A bill in the Minnesota state legislature would do the same. And next November, California will vote on a ballot initiative that would simply lower the drinking age to 18 across the board. The states would…

Many friends of mine — people who have worked for the progress of liberty for years — are mightily encouraged by the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They are both radicals of a sort, people who represent a threat to the established political order, they say. We too are against the establishment, so their rise suggests rising discontent with the status quo. That’s a step in the right direction, they say. So far, I see the point and I sympathize. But there’s a problem. The state power we oppose is not identical to the establishment we reject. You…

Some people hated it. Some people loved it. Just about everyone seems to miss the real point. The most disturbing part of the annual “State of the Union” address by the US president does not concern the specifics of the content, or the policies — as wonderful or objectionable as they may be. The core problem is the very strange presumption that one man comprehends an entire nation and its meaning, embodies something like a guiding spirit of a people, and thereby earns the right to manage the entire collective from the top down through the judicious use of power….

Henry Hazlitt says we shouldn’t make resolutions. He’s probably right. But last year I made these. It’s interesting to look back on them. Resolutions Don’t just hate oppression; love liberty even more. Be tolerant toward different ways of living; if it is not a threat to life and property, it is not a threat. Appreciate commercial culture and all those who work within it; they are part of the solution. Shop not only as a consumer, but also with the mindset of the merchant; our relationship should be one of mutual cooperation and understanding. Be humble concerning the shape freedom…

The most revealing film I’ve seen this year is “The Stanford Prison Experiment.” I highly recommend that you see it. Everyone should. If we took its lessons seriously, we would rethink more than just our prison system. We would rethink the whole system of government that has vexed humanity for thousands of years. If I had learned about this experiment in college, I had since forgotten about it. The experiment demonstrates the extent to which a title and an institutional context fundamental affects our perceptions of ourselves, and how quickly we adapt our assigned roles of master vs. subject. The…

Last month, it was the F word: fascism. The ascendancy of Vladimir Putin’s favorite for US president gave rise to it. The think pieces poured out, with a new sense of discovery of and reflection on the meaning of the term. As a further reflection of the darkened political environment — darkened for anyone who still believes that Thomas Jefferson was on to something with this whole liberty thing — this month, commentators are actually using the T word: totalitarian. “The Democrats’ Theme for 2016 Is Totalitarianism” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review. He cites a growing censorious spirit in…

At his recent Atlanta concert (yes, I was there and loved it) Justin Bieber was amazing but also his usual petulant self. He asked for a microphone stand. The adjustment mechanism on it broke. He became frustrated and hurled it across the stage. A crew member came over to fix it. “Why don’t you get me a new one before you fix the broken one,” barked Justin into the microphone so that everyone could hear. He finally began the song but cut it early. “I forgot the last verse, so let’s stop,” was how the song ended. Kind of insufferable,…

For 60 years, the conservative establishment has worked to overcome the biggest leftist lie of them all: that non-leftists are really Nazis in disguise. To wreck that view, conservatism reinvented itself after World War II. William Buckley, editor of National Review, led the way. He purged the hard racists, dedicated segregationists, the Falangists, the anti-semites, the crypto-Nazis, the theocrats and ecclesiocrats, and the wildly paranoid conspiracy mongers. Buckley was the one to do it too, because he was erudite and educated, with a subtle sense of things. It was a massive effort in social and political control, and it mostly…

A subtext of most of the superhero genre of fiction is that government has failed. It doesn’t provide the security people need. Superheros (Batman, Superman, Spiderman, et alia) have to step in. The portrayal of the police and public servants in this genre ranges between benign and malevolent. At its best, the public sector can get out of the way and let the superhero do his or her job. “Jessica Jones,” the acclaimed new series on Netflix (based on a Marvel Comics character), takes this approach to a new and much deeper level, particularly in its portrayal of the pathological…

At long last, we are seeing mainstream recognition of the incredibly obvious: Donald Trump is a fascist. What prompted the realization was Trump’s passing endorsement of registering Muslims in a national database. This was the wake up call. But come on: all the signs have been there since the beginning of his campaign. Why did it take so long? It’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf. You warn about wolves so much that no one takes you seriously when a real one actually shows up. Lefties since the late 1930s have tended to call all non-leftists fascists –…

This year has provided liberty lovers many learning opportunities. It’s been the best year in the history of technology and therefore for witnessing the expansion of human well being around the world. The app economy has matured to the point that it has challenged entrenched government regulations. Material prosperity has never been more widespread — and this is due not to government programs, as people tend to claim, but rather to spontaneous market innovations. Meanwhile, at the very same time that the world of economics is serving up miracles by the day, the world of politics has hit rock bottom….

The holidays celebrate material plenty. But that can be a tough sell these days. We mostly take our plenty for granted. We don’t even know its absence. This is especially true regarding food. Global hunger has fallen to historic lows — down 27% just since 2000. Fully 17 countries have improved by 50%. Famine has been effectively ended in normal times, and the few cases that remain are due not to a lack of production but to war. The situation in the developed world is incredible: poverty and hunger at historic lows, mostly nonexistent in most people’s life experience. Even…

Now that the final movie in the series is out, we know. “Hunger Games” is not just a popular movie series for young adults, a fantasy tale about about a young girl’s heroism. It is far more sophisticated than that. It is a political allegory, the best known of our time, about power and the complications of its displacement. In this way, it covers the same intellectual terrain as Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and de Jouvenel’s On Power, but in a way that is more penetrating for readers and viewers, and particularly relevant for our times. The final installment…

“We cry, but we never fear.” These were the words written on a sign, held up by a citizen in a mass rally in Paris, the day following the ghastly slaughter of innocents. The rally itself took place in defiance of the nighttime curfew that had been instituted by the French government (the first since 1944). This curfew came with other methods of control such as a border closure (again, first time since WWII), tanks on the streets, and a de facto end to free movement and assembly. What does the state of emergency mean? It means: no liberty. The…

One reason that the Brothers Grimm fairy tales have such appeal — more so than the folklore that came before — is that they deal with a world that is familiar to us, a world that was just being invented in the early 19th century, when these stories were first printed and circulated. They deal with people, scenes and events that affect what we call the middle class today, or the bourgeoisie. This was the world that serves as the backdrop to the tales of the Brothers Grimm. A great example of this is the very short story called “The…

When I was a kid, Halloween was only for kids. Adults were there to hand out candy — and monitor the kids to make sure we weren’t too much enjoying the culture of ghosts, ghouls, and goblins. That would be dabbling in evil, and our souls might be corrupted. My mom, for example, banned fake blood from the house. At the age of 15 or so, your Halloween fun was expected to be over. Times have dramatically changed. Now Halloween is for everyone. Costume shops are open all year, and do fabulous business in October. Parties are everywhere. Houses are…

Pot users might not be ending up in jail as frequently as they did 10 years ago. But cops, judges, and courts still exercise arbitrary power to ruin people’s lives, and they continue to do so at astonishing rates, all over the country. I recently saw this firsthand. I sat in a municipal traffic court from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., awaiting my own time with the judge for a petty moving violation. I was there with 150 other people, gathering cobwebs as the judge took his sweet time and shamed people as they stood at the bench and humbly…

Halloween seems to surpass Christmas in terms of kids’ excitement level. Kids spend months preparing their costumes, and thrill to every detail of the ceremony: pumpkins, scary things, and of course candy. For the children, too, there is the attractive fact that parents are not all that happy about Halloween with its goblins, gore, and gluttony. But, a deeper lesson to be drawn is that there is also an economic dimension to Halloween that goes far beyond simply demanding property with menaces, however lighthearted. Unlike at Christmas, where kids must only be good little citizens all year in order to…

Apple just rolled out its high-definition voice protocol. It sounds like the person is standing next to you. You can hear everything, even slight breathing inflections. It’s amazing. That new technology gives it an edge over the competition. And there’s plenty of it. You can make voice calls on the Facebook app, on Google Plus, on Skype, and probably one hundred other applications. And get this: they are all free. The last time I made a Facebook audio call from my phone, the person on the other end was shocked. “I didn’t know you could do this!” Well, it’s a…

I’m sitting in the car with my Uber driver and he points to some construction on the road. We are driving through the clogged streets of downtown Manhattan. “See that construction? It’s been that way for 10 years,” he notes, pointing to a big mess of blockages and torn up asphalt that is causing traffic to crawl. “Every day, 100 guys show up, drinking coffee, talking on their phones, having fun, and two guys, two Mexicans, are working on something. But nothing ever changes. The construction is never finished. It’s a mafia, I tell you.” His English was broken but…

Let’s say you have a trade deal that completely eliminates 18,000 existing tariffs between 12 countries that are otherwise hectoring each other with punishing trade barriers. To a person with a brain, this sounds amazing. Unless you are a luddite, a nativist, or a unionist, there seems to be every reason to support it. Trade is good. Global commerce is good. Fewer trade barriers are a good thing. But let’s say that this same treaty binds all 12 signatory nations to an egregious imposition of government privileges for reactionary corporations who are paying to keep their cartels in place. I’m…

You see this most often at weddings, funerals, and graduation parties. Many men attempt to dress up in a suit and tie, perhaps following the latest trend toward upgrading in general. However, they look affected, haughty, and horribly uncomfortable. You can be sure they are not wearing their real-life clothes. Men act as if someone poured them into a suit of armor and is making them march around like the Tin Man. This is a casualty of our age. With fewer men needing to wear suits, they don’t know how to wear them. They don’t know how to act, how…

My neighborhood is filling up with political yard signs. Vote for this guy! Vote for that guy! I can’t understand why people are willing to give up precious real estate on their front lawns, make friends mad at them, and put their own credibility on the line to back some politico who will certainly betray them in a matter of weeks. The con men who people cheer in politics have done little or nothing to deserve this kind of public support. My neighborhood forbids commercial advertising on the front lawn, but the code makes an exception for politicians running for…

Many people are reluctant to prepare fish at home. This is my strong impression from talking to friends and colleagues. This usually traces back to one bad experience. Maybe it came from childhood. The fish was fishy, boney, and just generally dreadful. That one experience can color a lifetime of food choices. In my own case, I thought for years I would only eat fish at a restaurant. Only they know how to do it right, I thought. Surely I could never replicate that process at home. At most, I could make those awful breaded fish sticks Mom would drag…

I’m not ruling out a sudden surge, but, as for this writing, it seems very likely that Rand Paul will not get the Republican nomination, at least not this time. Maybe the future will be different. Let’s reflect on the meaning of this and its implications for the future of liberty. Based on my social feeds, many libertarians are drawing the wrong lessons. They say that the reason Rand didn’t pull it off is because he departed too much from the script. He should have been more upfront about his libertarianism. He should have been more aggressive in pushing a…

What an incredible slog the third hour of the CNN debate was. It took real effort to stay with it. There were whole swaths where the words all ran together. The questions grew ever more tedious and the answers more so. The waves of wonkiness were sleep inducing. As Slate said, “The debate coverage was so long that if it had been an interrogation, you’d have ended up confessing to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby just to get it over with.” And the most preposterous lie of American public life — that our supreme leader must have a perfect plan for…

It’s time libertarians get serious about realizing that there exists such a thing as Brown-shirted socialism. It masquerades as patriotic. It seeks national greatness. It celebrates the majority race and dehumanizes the other. It is violently protectionist. On cultural matters, it is anti-leftist (“politically incorrect”). It is unapologetically authoritarian.

This is a system of exploiters and the exploited, exactly as Marx himself had explained. But this difference is this. The law is the exploiter. The population is the exploited. It’s not complex. But misidentifying the identities of who is who — a mistake that characterizes centuries of political thought — can have terrible consequences.

“Never buy wine in a jug with a handle.” A friend gave me this advice in my youth. It was the worst wine advice I ever received. It reinforced the culture of wine snobbery that has pillaged many generations of consumers. Wine snobbery treats this drink as if it were always a serious undertaking requiring expertise, snootiness, and a high budget. Have you been at a wine tasting held by a local aficionado? People stand around sipping and pretending to be experts. “I sense a hint of blueberry and saddle leather,” and everyone around agrees that this is true, no…

Just trust her. Truly, just trust her: to know precisely how much energy we ought to use, where it should come from, how it should be generated, how we should get from here to there, and the effects that her plan will have on the global — the global! — climate, not just in the near term but decades or a century from now. If you do this, you will have embraced “science,” “reality,” “truth,” and “innovation,” and, also, “our children.” If you don’t go along, you not only reject all those good things; you are probably also a “denier,” the…

What is it with the GOP contenders this year, and their horrid fashion sense? It’s the worst dressed crew in many years. Just as the quality of minds and policies have dramatically fallen since Calvin Coolidge, so too has their sense of how to look right. Look, I’m not one to judge other people’s dress. What people wear and how they wear it is their own business. But it becomes our business when these people are seeking to rule the rest of us. Judge we shall. Consider the standard. Coolidge was awesome. The hat, the high collar, the double-breasted suit, the…

Today I received a letter from the government. It said that their system believes I owe them a few extra dollars. So far as I could tell, they wanted me to send a check in the mail, so this is what I set out to do. In the course of doing this, I recalled a technique for mailing letters that was once widely in use. I’m going to march through the steps on this process so that today’s readers will know what to do should the occasion ever arise in which you have to send a letter with a check…

I’m a curious shopper, so I asked the lady at the Bloomingdale’s men’s cologne department: “Does anyone really buy this stuff after high school?” Without missing a beat, she pointed out that the men’s cologne department has consistently beat the women’s perfume department in sales for the last year. Most kids can’t afford this stuff anyway, she said. And “it’s not just for kids.”. Well, my car was being washed, and I had time to kill, so I decided to find out everything there is to know about men’s cologne. And I did. I will now share. First the theory…

The headline story last week was as disturbing as it was ironic. The Gallup poll reveals that both blacks and whites think race relations are generally bad, and by wide margins. In general, two thirds of survey respondents say that people are not getting along and that tension is high. The striking fact: this is the reverse of what people believed in the days after the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. American civic culture has always treated the presidency as some kind of mystical pinnacle, a beautiful bellwether of where we are as a people and…

The major contribution that American politics makes to American life is purely consumptive entertainment. After all, we only elect fewer than 1% of those who rule us, and once they get in power, they do what they want to anyway. Mostly that amounts to paying back with grants and favors those who funded their campaigns. Otherwise they have little power to change anything. The value proposition of elections for the rest of us is to be delighted by the horse race itself. We like to follow polls the way we follow sports teams. And there is the major benefit of…

Last week I wrote an article that, I’m pretty sure, received the highest circulation I’ve ever had on a single piece of writing. It was an an interesting experience. The first version appeared on Liberty.me. Probably four days later, I revised it, re-stylized it, and it appeared on FEE.org. Then Newsweek picked it up, then ZeroHedge, and it went viral from there. My social was slammed. I can’t keep up with the interview requests. It’s a bizarre thing because I write every day. Why this one? Why now? I have no idea, no theory. I try to put valuable stuff…

It’s not too interesting to say that Donald Trump is a nationalist and aspiring despot who is manipulating bourgeois resentment, nativism, and ignorance to feed his power lust. It’s uninteresting because it is obviously true. It’s so true that stating it sounds more like an observation than a criticism. I just heard Trump speak live. It was an awesome experience, like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground, and died grim deaths. His speech at FreedomFest lasted a full hour, and I consider myself fortunate for having heard it. It was a magnificent…

Lawrence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education opened FreedomFest 2015 with a marvelous lecture on Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). It was the perfect opening to this conference, a gathering of liberty-minded people from all over the world. It was a rally cry for liberty and how to get there: through hope, creativity, and hard work. It thrills me in particular because I have this hope that Tocqueville will be revived among all readers. His great book Democracy in America is available free online. Download it (1 and 2) and absorb its brilliant lessons. Tocqueville embodies what was once meant…

Is it possible to develop a heartfelt and deep affection for a string of 1s and 0s? This is how I feel about Bitcoin right now. I’m just so proud of this little tool, an implausible techno-monetary creation that, only 6 years ago, just a handful of people believed could work. Today, it is emerging as a safe haven currency for the entire world. If that reality doesn’t make a case for a bit of humility on the part of financial and economic elites, I don’t know what would. Bitcoin isn’t even supposed to exist. It wasn’t created by the…

This year at Porcfest, some state revenue agents showed up to check the food vendors for licenses. Little did these G-men know that they had inadvertently stumbled into the least friendly place in the world for bureaucratic harassment. They left after 30 minutes and didn’t return. It’s a harrowing case, but it illustrates something very important: power can and will back down under the right conditions. What are those conditions and how can we create and expand them? It’s my second year at Porcfest — the first time was only for one day and it was too much a whirlwind…

Following the Supreme Court decision mandating legal same-sex marriage nationwide, the New York Times tells us that, “gay rights leaders have turned their sights to what they see as the next big battle: obtaining federal, state and local legal protections in employment, housing, commerce and other arenas.” In other words, the state will erect new barriers to freedom of choice in place of the old ones that just came down! To make the case against such laws, it ought to be enough to refer to the freedom to associate and the freedom to use your property as you see fit….

In real life, a holiday means to have time off work and have fun. In the world of banking, a holiday means to rob the customer as a way of keeping a bankrupt system afloat. It’s been a few years since we’ve seen that happen in any major world economy, but that is exactly what the Greek government is pursuing, starting now, to stop a massive bank run. Drained and fed up, other governments in the European Union refused to extend yet another loan to Greece. This panicked depositors, who have lined up at ATMs all over the country. Sure…

People often say that unless you are making stuff, you are not really producing. This view has been with us since the ancient world. Even Aristotle found retailing to be disgusting, and money lending even more so. Advertising people are not actually contributing to the physical store of wealth in society. They aren’t growing crops. They aren’t hammering on a bench. They aren’t carving a sculpture. So in what sense can we really say they are creating value? Such views completely misconstrue the nature of wealth and the job of enterprise. What is wealth? It is that which enhances human…

When it comes to being employed by the government, membership has its privileges. How far do these privileges extend? It’s a question that is central to political philosophy. It is most poignantly addressed by one of my favorite pieces of writing, Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law (1850). The same question is being debated on the streets in every US city today. Videos of citizen abuse at the hands of the police are everywhere. It seems the cops have been empowered to do to us what we would never be allowed to do to each other. Some cases have made it to…

Why are there marriage “licenses” – a permission slip granted or denied by the state – rather than just contracts like any other? Why does government stand in the position to veto the choices of two people who want to commit to each other? These are questions that the Alabama Senate considered in May this year. The result was the passage of Senate Bill 377, supported by 22 senators and opposed by only 3. Under this legislation, licenses would no longer exist for marriage. Marriage would become a plain contract filed with the Probate offices. In effect, this would restore…

There is not an informed lover of liberty and progress who is not shaken today. I’ve had a lump in my throat all day, nearly fighting back tears, over the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht, visionary and now martyr. He was sentenced to life in prison, and the judge’s words were chilling in the extreme.

[Ross Ulbricht’s mother will be on Liberty.me Live to talk with us on Monday evening.] If you didn’t know it already, the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht, life in prison, underscores the point. There are deep structural injustices that take place in the United States under the cover of law and justice. This is one of the most egregious I’ve seen. This brilliant and creative young man has been put away for performing a much-needed digital experiment. He opened an open-air market in the digital cloud and thereby demonstrated to the world that there is a better way than the state’s…

I’ve just reacquainted myself with two seminal texts: Aristotle’s Politics and Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism. Though written nearly two and a half millennia apart, it’s remarkable how these two gigantically important treatises parallel each other. They both come to the defense of property and realistic forms of political order in the face of all kinds of dreamers, fanatics, and would-be dictators. A central contribution of each book is to defend the institution of private property against its enemies, who, both Aristotle and Mises knew, would smash all that is wonderful about life. They took different pathways toward the same goal….

It was just another day of suffering — intense, grueling, non-stop suffering. It had began weeks ago, and escalated by the day. It was my nose. This particular day, the tip of it was actually in pain, to the point that I couldn’t touch it. My nose was running. I feared blowing it because that made it hurt worse than ever. The sneezes were coming every few minutes and increasing in frequency. It was not entirely clear when all of this horror began. I began to ask around to friends and colleagues: do you recall if I sneezed a lot…

What is real homemade ice cream? Oh, I’ve made it before. It has always struck me that you can’t really make real homemade ice cream with an electric machine. Electricity is so artificial, and if you are going to plug in a machine, in what sense are you actually making the stuff? Pouring ingredients into an electric bucket and waiting isn’t really “making” anything. You might as well let someone else do that and buy it from them.

Does anyone on the Los Angeles City Council have a clue about what they have just done? It really is unclear whether reality matters in this legislative body. Rarely have we seen such jaw-dropping display of economic fallacy enacted into law. The law under consideration here is a new wage floor of $15, phased in over five years. Why phased in? Why not do it now? Why not $30 or $150? Perhaps the implied reticence here illustrates just a bit of caution. Somewhere in the recesses of the councilors’ minds, they might have a lurking sense that there will be…

We learn better, think more, become creative and use more of our brain power, when we are having fun. It’s even better when we can do this with friends. It’s even better when we can do all this with a commercial spirit. One man seems to get this better than anyone I know. His name is Mark Skousen. He is an unusual figure in the modern history of liberty, an educator but with a special method. He is a trained economist, an adherent of the Austrian School, but also a real-life practitioner, in so many multifarious ways. For decades, he…

It’s easy enough to dismiss the idea of Liberland as a far-flung libertarian scheme. We’ve been here before, as the history of the Phoenix Foundation shows. Anyone can come up with dozens of reasons why it cannot and will not succeed. But all of this misses the point. The importance of Liberland might be entirely symbolic, but symbols are hugely important to our future of liberty. For the world to imagine the possibility of a truly free country is the beginning step of making it a reality. Liberland came about in April 2015, when Czech political activist Vít Jedlička proclaimed…

Suing the government is always risky. It’s mostly unsuccessful. But the inventor of the first 3-D-printed gun (“The Liberator”) is forging ahead anyway. He has filed suit against the US Department of State for forcing him to take down his digital files from the Internet. The New York Times quoted several constitutional attorneys who believe that Wilson case is non-trivial and could possibly be decided in his favor. First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams told the Times: “On the face of it, it seems to me like a serious claim.” The grounds he has chosen are interesting and compelling. He says…

Everyone seems to know about Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It’s all about unequal distribution of income and the government measures we need to fix it. But we’ve been here before. Deja vu. The same focus drove the public debate more than a century ago. It’s strange how a bestselling book from a century ago could so completely disappear from view. But that’s the case with Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, written in 1879. It became the single most influential book on economics during the highest period of economic growth ever recorded. This was true for decades after…

Now that I’m two months without smoking cigarettes, I thought I would chronicle some weird features of the decision and the strange effects I didn’t expect. In fact, the benefits are not the ones usually featured in anti-smoking campaigns. Now, you might say: “quitting smoking is a no brainer. Why should I congratulate you that you finally decided to stop giving yourself cancer?” Well, here’s something nonsmokers don’t usually realize. Smokers care about lung cancer (heck, everyone fears cancer!) but, actually, for many smokers, they don’t care that much. The risk of getting lung cancer without smoking is about 1%…

It was 2:00pm and I was in Atlanta, Georgia. I had hoped to gather some liberty-minded folks for a get-together at 6:00pm, something that would have been impossible only a few years ago. But now we have the Internet, and we have Liberty.me. Sure enough, when the time arrived dozens gathered. It turns out that many people who came already knew each other — through friendships established at Liberty.me. Forgive me for getting emotional about these things. But as I stood back and watched happy people talking and exchanging ideas, I had the sudden realization. Liberty.me has changed the world….

If you have seen “The Wire,” you know the score. There are consequences to state management of any social order. Baltimore is a paradigmatic case. How long can people continue to evade the obvious lessons? It began more than 100 years ago with the imposition of state segregation. This was the original sin that created a second-class of citizenship and racial ghettos for the first time since the end of the Civil War. Every policy response follows from there, with one coercive mistake following another. This town became the backyard playground for the ruling-class planners in Washington, D.C.. The intellectuals…

One of the strangest videos I’ve seen in years consists of Barack Obama (yes, that guy) interviewing David Simon, the creator of the epic television series The Wire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWY79JCfhjw The Wire, which aspires to a realistic presentation of Baltimore street life, is a devastating expose of the failure of the drug war, public schools, the welfare state, and punitive policing as a means of social uplift. The series pictures a level of ineffectiveness and corruption that overwhelms the viewer with a realization: the government is the number one barrier to turning this violent wasteland into a civilized world. The viewer…

Last week, I reread Anthem by Ayn Rand, an extraordinarily beautiful tribute to innovation as the life force of progress in society. It was published in 1937 but mostly drafted in the 1920s in Russia. But get ready for chills when you realize that this story is actually coming true, right now. In the dystopian story, a cruel government committee comes down hard on a young man who has re-discovered the light bulb. They condemn him for daring to think for himself and presuming to override the planned poverty of the social order. This society ruled by the total state is…

Who knew that the market for blenders is so complicated? I feel like I just waded into an incredible thicket of expertise, vociferous opinion, infinite choice, and high-fashion kitchen confusion. It began inauspiciously enough. I needed a blender because everyone seems to be making smoothies. Surely this is no big deal, I thought. I need a machine that grinds stuff up and turns it into a drinkable liquid. I’ll head to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and grab one. How difficult can this be? I found out pretty quickly. At first I shopped based on price. Here is one for $20….

“The author does not understand socialism,” read the letter from MacMillan in reply to the submission of Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem. They turned it down. Actually, the publisher didn’t understand socialism. Hardly anyone did in 1937, when this book was written. Rand, however, did understand socialism. She understood it so well that she knew it would result in the opposite of what it promised and that its proponents would eventually come to embrace its grim reality, rather than repudiate the system of thought. In many ways, this book is one of the best dystopian novels ever written because it puts…

The Clinton campaign for president is going to shake out the same way that the Obama candidacy did. In the end, its primary appeal will be to identity politics. Voters will be asked to make possible a historic advance for women. Only this way, we will be told, can we as a nation (people, humanity, whatever) put to rest a long history of subjugation and exclusion. The history is correct but the solution is not. There is nothing necessarily wrong with cheering the election of a woman president. What’s incorrect is the belief that a woman president will make women’s…

What is the difference between murder and normal police work? Many people who have seen the video from North Charleston, South Carolina, are just sure it constitutes murder. In a moral sense, and this is probably the sense we should draw upon, it does seem like outright murder. One man in a public park is slowly running away and another man draws a gun and shoots him in the back eight times. Cold blooded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXO3Ix_GIyI The person doing the shooting has the legal right to kill people who resist his orders, because he is a cop, an agent of the…

“Do you think supporting Rand Paul for President is good for liberty?” Here is my incredibly unsatisfying answer: I don’t know. Truly, I don’t. Neither do you. Why can’t we just admit this? There is something about politics that elicits in everyone a faux sense of certainty. No matter how many times that political results contradict political promise, we still mostly pretend as if we know for certain what will happen when so and so wins. We know that Jim would be better than Jane, that Joan will be better than John, and so on. How do we know? How…

The year was 1975, and times were seriously changing. The protests against the Vietnam War ended an egregious slaughter. A president resigned to avoid impeachment. The postwar economic policies of the ruling class had proven unworkable. The illusion that the state could plan and save the world began its precipitous freefall. And modern consumer culture was born with the most preposterous possible product: a rock in a box. It sold millions. It enraptured the masses with its sheer implausibility, and people delighted in every bit of it, without even knowing why. They didn’t need to know why. Gary Dahl, the…

The Romans invented indoor plumbing. It took America in the late 20th century to uninvent it. The fateful year was 1994, when the federal government mandated that all toilets manufactured and sold in the U.S. have tanks no bigger than 1.6 gallons. It was the new prohibitionism. Gradually over the coming years, the toilets stopped working as they once did. The reality was slow to dawn on Americans, who are rather used to improvement in consumer products, not slow depreciation, devaluation, and even destruction. Over time, the problems were legion. It took two or three flushes instead of one to…

“Bunch of do gooders shutting down the last chance these people had.” This sentence is a rare moment of truth concerning the coming regulation (or shutdown) or the payday loan industry. It appeared in the comment box on the New York Times story. Otherwise, most comments were out for blood. Regulate them! Limit interest! Make them all suffer for their usurous ways! But, pretty much, the commentator I quoted has it right. The effort by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to regulate payday lending on a national level, backed by President Obama, cannot lead to good things, either for the…

Ted Cruz thought he had a captive audience when he spoke at the campus of Liberty University. Ten thousand students sat there attentively, all required to attend as part of the discipline of campus life. Floating above the crowd, in a way that no one could see, was a different world of information. Students were using Yik Yak to make fun of the guy, mocking his every sentence. Some smart cookie among the media picked up on it and reported it. It’s politics so the revelation became national news. Now the Yak is out of the bag, and it’s a…

Vancouver, Canada, which is the perfection of the best city you have ever been in, has at least one big problem besides its high taxes: its regulations on hamburgers. Actually it all traces to a larger regulation in British Columbia generally. I’ve never visited when this regulation did not vex me personally and become the topic of ongoing conversation. It’s all about the temperature to which you are required to cook hamburger meat. It all must be well done, all in the interest of saving you and me and everyone from some dangerous disease that comes with underdone hamburgers, or…

Without much fanfare, this month Microsoft announced that it is phasing out its notorious Internet browser called Internet Explorer. In all the news stories about this, the main focus has been on how it has been outcompeted by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, among many other browsers on the market. In addition, mobile applications are making gigantic gains over web browsing in general. Indeed that is true. On the platforms I’ve managed, I watched as IE went from 95% of use to 20%, a spectacular and well-deserved crash and burn that took fully 20 years. Microsoft was never able to fix…

The thrill of driving into Pittsburgh from the airport never quite dissipates. The bridges, the rivers, the hills, and, above all else, the massive amounts of steel everywhere that just shout “productivity!” — it’s all brilliant. I just spent the last weekend there, at a conference sponsored by the Young Americans for Liberty, and the whole feeling came back, all over again, more so than ever. Pittsburgh is a town that makes me want to rhapsodize about industry like a Randian. Its skyline, the materials and shapes that make up the structure of the city, celebrate man’s creative genius in…

How incredibly silly can government be? Think of this. Oil prices have fallen 55% in the last year. The trend defied every expectation and it’s been wonderful. It’s an impressive illustration of how prices work to reveal underlying resource realities. Technology has blasted away the last decade’s wild and misguided fears of a shortage. Exports and production are at an all-time high in response to unprecedented demand. The stunning events have been a boon to consumers, as downward pressure keeps pushing on prices at the pump. The market as an institution is giving us oil as never before. It is…

This past weekend, a nasty chest cold rose inexorably to my sinuses and took root, shutting down my sense of smell and taste. I only realized it when I was at lunch with friends. I ordered the clam chowder. I couldn’t taste a thing. It was all texture and no flavor: chewy bits of meat, mushy potatoes, and some tasteless soup with a milky texture. Otherwise, it was uneventful. Everyone else was raving about their bowls of chowder. I could only experience it vicariously. It was strangely demoralizing, like a major way that I perceive things around me was suddenly…

I had a quick phone conversation with Ross Ulbricht the other day. I expressed my support and passed on the support of thousands of others. His voice was clear, with a pretty tenor intonation. He thanked me for the public support I’ve given him. We exchanged a few other thoughts. It was a deeply moving moment for me. It can be easy to de-humanize a public figure like Ross, especially given that he has been so demonized by the government as a dangerous drug kingpin who hires hitmen against his enemies. He has never even been allowed to speak to…

Sometime in the late 1980s, I found myself in a mild debate with Murray Rothbard over matters of strategy. It was an exchange of private letters. I cannot recall the specifics but the issue had something to do with how broad or narrow an ideological journal, with the goal of propagating a body of ideas, ought to be in order to achieve its goals. Should it encourage broad debate, or try overtly to advance a particular plumbline of thought? Should it be an advocate of one point of view and thereby exclusionary, or a venue inclusive of many points of…

Here’s what’s really going on. The incumbent rulers of the world’s most exciting technology have decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. To impose a new rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo. What’s being sold as economic fairness and a wonderful favor to consumers is actually a sop to industrial giants who are seeking untrammeled access to your wallet and an end to competitive threats to market power. One person I know…

I was at a restaurant for lunch and had time to visit with the waitress, who turns out to be a college graduate from a good institution with a decent degree in European languages. But here she is waiting tables with non-degreed people 5 years her younger and 10 years her elder. There’s nothing wrong with that and she is making good money. But you have to wonder: what was the professional advantage to her of those four hard years in school and the $200K spent in them. What were the opportunity costs? This is not another article to disparage…

The cultural panic about the enormous commercial success of 50 Shades of Grey has gone on for years, and, from that, you might get the impression that the story romanticizes unspeakable things. Though I’ve not read the book, my impression from the movie was entirely opposite. It is not a hymn to the secret glories of BDSM. It is a sophisticated allegory that takes apart, and ultimately condemns in the strongest terms, the psychological foundations of seemingly consensual human relationships that are actually based on dependency, abuse, and power. For the already scandalized, here is a brief synopsis as I…

That moment when I unwrapped my first music CD, and it glistened as the beam of sun hit it, generating beautiful rainbow-like colors all around me, the colors of a digital future — somehow that moment will forever be etched in my mind. It looked to my eye like the dawning of a new age. Out with those large, heavy, black vinyl saucers that were taking up so much space in my apartment — probably fully ten feet of “long playing” records. And now, even suddenly, it was actually possible that my lifetime collection was being made obsolete. I rejoiced…

When Edward Snowden came on camera, live at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C., I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. Here is a courageous man who did a daring and wonderful thing for the world in exposing what the U.S. government was doing to its own citizens. For speaking out, he had to flee the U.S. government’s jurisdiction. Officials have said that if they ever get their hands on him, they will wring his neck. So he ended up in…Russia. I’m old enough to remember Cold War propaganda. We built weapons and waged hot and cold wars…

I recently published the results of some detailed reading I had done in early 20th century intellectual history as it pertained to the minimum wage. In order to grasp the full horror of the thing, you need to read the original articles and books in question. Here you have a large gaggle of intellectuals — all write as if there is no debate — arguing for the minimum wage as an exclusionary measure, a method of social isolation. And why? They had this idea that if you deny people jobs, they will be demotivated to reproduce. If they don’t reproduce,…

Convicted on all counts, said the jury in the case of Ross Ulbricht, the man who built the original Silk Road website. He faces a minimum of 30 years in prison and a maximum of life. Never mind that the online drug-distribution market is bigger than ever, and that there are dozens of newer and more polished versions of the Silk Road. It is inconceivable that they will ever go away in this digital age. And the administrators have learned from this trial. They will be more careful next time. The state wanted this man. Let’s say that he goes…

I live in a college town where drunk driving is a way of life. I once asked a policeman what his main job was in my town and he said very plainly: “stopping and arresting drunk drivers.” I asked how he knows whom to stop. His answer is that he has developed a nose for this. They are everywhere. He has learn to send one after another to jail. It’s sport. It’s also very lucrative for the city. Once you total up the costs to the convicted, they range between $9,000 and $25,000. The first fruits go directly to the…

The web is packed with some of the greatest educational material on entrepreneurship and enterprise, material that didn’t exist a decade ago and is now within the mouse-click reach of vast swaths of humanity. Are we taking advantage of it? I set out to collect the top 15 videos on entrepreneurship — a totally subjective list, of course, but these are the ones we have found most compelling. Watching all of these provides a great overview of the contribution that enterprise makes to the quality of life. They illustrate, too, the dangers of government rules, regulations, taxes, and trade restrictions….

Two movies in theaters right now highlight the great truth of our age that, for some reason, many still deny. That truth is the supreme value of computer code and the access to information it enables. Information is the valuable commodity that is driving forward global economic progress. It’s more important than all the physical property precisely because it is helping us, gradually, make progress against the insuperable limits of scarcity and the vanity of power. Both films get us closer to understanding that. The two movies are “The Imitation Game” and “Blackhat.” They are set roughly 70 years apart….

The man on the plane asked the woman next to him: “So you knit? Which was a ridiculous question because she was sitting there knitting. She had the yarn, the needles, and some emergent clothing thing flopping around her lap. The question was completely pointless. Yes, he was just trying to make conversation. These situations are always oddly awkward, and, as she explained to me later, she never likes to speak to neighbors on planes. Still, she answered him that, yes, she knits. Then he said: “So are you part of a knitting group?” Now, this is an interesting question…

It’s always a bad sign when a president wants to revive in peacetime a policy that thrived in the midst of wartime central planning. This is what happened during the State of the Union address. President Obama bragged of the policy that lasted from 1944 to 1946 in which a mere 130,000 children (as Nick Gillespie points out) had their daycare covered by the federal government. Right now, the feds pay for 1.3 million kids to be in daycare, which means that there are ten times as many children in such a program now as versus 1944. The war policy…

The trial of Ross Ulbricht, alleged to be the administrator of the Silk Road website that distributed illicit drugs peer-to-peer, opened with a shocker. His attorney very quickly admitted that the Silk Road was Ross’s idea. He envisioned a free market in the cloud in which people could circumvent prohibitions and restrictions and gain from trade in a peaceful and productive way. That much I’m pretty sure that I knew. Having done so, Ross’s attorney continued, Ross realized that he was in way over his head, because, after all, there was a rather substantial amount of pent-up demand. Once the…

A friend of mine dropped and broke his new iPhone 6 and, for a moment there, it seemed he would have to roll back to an iPhone 5. It seemed like an intolerable fate. When the iPhone 4 came out only two years ago, it was the most space-age gizmo ever held by the average consumer. Now rolling back even one step in the forward trajectory seems like a dramatic setback. But it could be worse. Can you imagine life without your smartphone or even without the Internet? We watch movies made ten years ago in which people are using…

I keep wondering if the men’s cape should come back. I think it should. There is a scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence is presented with the white garb of an Arab sheik, following his amazing rescue of a man during a long trek through the desert. He puts it on, finds a private spot, and practices walking, running, bowing, and playing the part. It is the viewer’s first signal of consummated love between this Englishman and his new, adopted culture. So it was for me when I was in Spain a few years ago. A gentleman attending…

Most people have been there: a few drinks at a restaurant or bar and then into the car to get home. Am I over the legal limit? Hard to say. Is my driving impaired? It doesn’t seem to be. But what if I get stopped? Will I lose my license, go to jail, and be disgraced in front of the community? It’s a frightening prospect. What’s especially strange about this is the reason I fear. My arrest and punishment would not be for driving recklessly or for endangering other drivers. It would be because I failed a test of something…

Once you realize the “intellectual property” laws are completely unnecessary, there is no going back. You see that innovation happens despite them, not because of them. You see that they actually slow down innovation by inhibiting information flows and stifling competition with government grants of monopoly privilege. You see just how artificial they are too, imposing scarcity where it need not be. Shared information is essential to the market economy; IP is a fundamental attack on sharing and hence on the well functioning of economic life. All of this seems obvious once you see it but people still resist. Why…

Concerning a conference I’m attending in two weeks, a huge controversy has broken out about one of the 50 or so speakers. Many people think he is a scam artist, a guy who came up with a new cryptocoin as part of a ponzi-like pump-and-dump scheme. The idea is that you hype a new innovation, promise massive returns with hopped up language, pay off early investors with proceeds from future investors, drive up the price, and then bail suddenly and send your regrets. I have no idea about the particulars of this case, but if the accusations turn out to…

Last year, Americans received the news that the U.S. has long engaged in torture as part of its futile and destructive war on terror. This torture extended to people never charged with a crime and people who were, as it turns out, completely innocent. The entire world heard the news. If it is possible that the U.S.’s moral standing in the world could be tarnished more, this did it. Why should we care? Well, this is my home. I don’t like being a citizen of a morally disgraced nation that tortures innocent people. I personally felt a sense of devastation,…

The most surprising monetary innovation of our time is bitcoin, a privately produced digital currency and payment system. It is a global system that provides a dramatic alternative to central banking and monetary nationalism as we know it. As with other innovations, such as email and texting, it could challenge the dominance of government policies. What will we lose if the private system replaces the government-managed one? A look at the history of central banking — and the theories behind the history — shows that we only stand to lose a system that has proven unworkable and dangerous in every…

For 2015, I would like to pick up an old campaign to take back the word “liberal” for the cause of human liberty. Or perhaps that’s too ambitious. Perhaps it is enough for each of us to do our part not to keep conceding the use of this glorious word to the enemies of liberty. It does not belong to them. It belongs to us. This is not a tedious argument over definitions; this is about the proper identification of a magnificent intellectual tradition. Liberalism is about human liberty and its gradual progress over the last 500 years. It is…

As the new year dawns, so does the new Liberty.me. The development team and community are super excited about this new release. It has been greeted with unanimous acclaim, and site activity has gone way up even in the holiday season. It is a credit to the Liberty.me members who have provided detailed and wonderful feedback over these months of beta. Liberty.me is a market institution, which is to say that its life draws from its capacity to serve its customers. This service is powered by mutually beneficial exchange. It is a matter of the voluntary meeting of minds. But…

This holiday season, American consumers have received an unexpected gift. Mine came this morning when I filled up my car with gas. I paid $2.13 per gallon. This felt like luxury. It seems surprising, implausible, even wonderful. I asked around. Some people are paying even less, even $2. All the pressure is down. Down — despite everything. Looking at the history, I found the following chart from the U.S. Energy Administration, already a bit out of date — the forecast doesn’t anticipate the extent of the fall– but it shows that gas prices are settling back to 1990’s levels and…

“Penguins of Madagascar” is a prequel to the famed Madagascar series but it also represents a deepening in the moral and ethical themes of the series. Penguins is, above all else, a penetrating exploration of the driving motivation and socio-political consequences of that most destructive of the seven deadly sins: envy. As the story unfolds, viewers are introduced to subtleties in the meaning of envy and how it is distinguished from ambition, covetousness, or mere jealousy. Envy seeks destructive of the good, the beautiful, and the true as an end in itself. It loathes achievement as such and seeks to…

Welcome to the holiday season in which nearly the whole of humanity completely loots the commons. There would be no holiday season without the commons. It’s all owned by everyone: the stories, the music, the traditions, many of the movies, the decorations, the fashions. So much for copyright, patent, and trademark — those legislative attempts to create fake property rights out of thin air. If this season were protected and owned in that matter, it would shrivel and die. “Intellectual property” has absolutely nothing to do with this season. And yet, mysteriously and magically, it all works. Producers still make…

[Thank you to the Free State Project for commissioning this piece. If you haven’t been, the FSP’s Liberty Forum is a spectacular event, March 5-8, 2014] If you have no choice over the particulars of the regime under which you are forced to live, if there is near-zero chance that your own aspirations and views can be reflected in the shape of the laws and regulations that rule your life and choices, you are not politically free. This lesson comes from Ludwig von Mises’s 1919 book Nation, State, and Economy. As he pointed out, political freedom was the driving reformist…

There are many terrible things in the world but the clothing market is not one of them. The entire sector is dynamic and creative, distributing essential goods to the globe in ways that appeal to the infinite variety of human desire and economic means to buy. Opportunities to buy are ubiquitous in both the physical and digital worlds. In my grandmother’s early life, her mother sewed her dresses from flour sacks and repaired sock holes to make them last for many years. Today, even the poor have large wardrobes for every occasion. It’s an amazing transformation. Moreover, over the last…

People are rioting in the streets, bombs are falling on innocents, we get daily reports of torture and massive human suffering. What can we do? We can make bread. Bread is the oldest symbol of what it means for human hands to create things rather than destroy them. When you make bread, you realize the dream of how human action can exceed and even defy the sum of its parts. Bread feeds rather than destroys, delights instead of demoralizes, reveals the new rather than wallows in the old. Some things in life are not dispensable, no matter what the dietary…

The criminal trial of Ross Ulbricht, the man alleged to be the “Dread Pirate Roberts” who started the darknet’s Silk Road website, is coming up soon. As might be expected, the prosecution in the case are engaging in shady tactics, such as not permitting the jury to hear about Ross’s own political views. The website was started with a driving motivation of creating a free marketplace for people to use to exchange peacefully. If Ross shares this view, why is this not a relevant fact? How can there be a fair trial if the jury is not permitted to hear…

Money and helicopters have a long rhetorical relationship. Former Fed Governor Ben Bernanke was called “Helicopter Ben” for the way he handled the financial crisis of 2008 and following. We imagined him flying all over the country dropping dollars on cities and towns. The root of that moniker was Ben’s own comments about the right way to fight deflation. But there’s an even deeper root. The “quantity theory of money” imagines that we dispense with the details of precisely how to get new money to the population and instead imagine that it is dropped from helicopters. The problem with that…

I don’t have the stomach to watch anymore videos of beatings by police. New ones seem to be coming out by the day. As ghastly as they are, as horrifying as is the truth we are seeing, I’m glad these videos exist. I’m happy we have the technology to finally catch criminal acts taking place, even or especially when they take place under the cover of law. In many ways, these viral videos are forging what might be the most significant and lasting political movement of my lifetime, a full-scale revolt against what everyone used to believe was the most…

It was sometime in the late 1980s when I first met Nathaniel Branden, the objectivist psychologist and author who died yesterday at the age of 84. I went to see his speech being hosted by the Heritage Foundation. Not having updated my information about him, I had still him pictured in my mind as the enforcer at the Ayn Rand circle in New York in the 1960s. Strangely, I had actually played the role of him in a play Murray Rothbard wrote about the circle a few years earlier.

Every politically active group wants something from government, and government is happy to oblige. It’s even more obvious in the election season. Another way to put it: Government has lots to give in the way of laws, loot, privileges, protections and punishments. Every pressure group and political party has an idea about how its power over us needs to be used. Does it make any difference who gets the loot, really? Not really, not to you and me. Whether you are taxed to make bike paths in Palo Alto or to fund reconnaissance missions in Kabul, you are still denied…

The reality struck me hard this morning: many people are still having a hard time swallowing pills. It’s remarkable to think of the basic tasks of life many people have yet to master. This is one of them. You will be sitting in a restaurant and at the start of a meal, a lady at the next table will take out her pill box and put one in her mouth. What follows is excruciating. Gulps of water and then the crazed head toss, again and again, flinging the head backwards in jerky motions as if this will cause the pill…

Imagine a conference so good that 100% of attendees are at the session on the morning of the second day. I’ve never seen that before. But that’s what what happened at BitcoinSouth, the first Bitcoin conference in New Zealand. The reason is obvious to anyone there. The conference was beautifully organized, packed with wonderful speakers and presentations, and featured a lively social ambiance throughout. There was a coherent path that the lectures took in terms of content. We started with the big picture, did an overview of Bitcoin, moved into current commercial applications, introduced 2.0 technologies, did a walk through…

What does it take to get eyeballs on your website? How low do you have to go? The web has been through many iterations on this subject, and now the space is crowded beyond belief. User behavior is diffuse and utility-focussd apps are drawing the main attention. Given this, how do you get traffic? For two years, the answer has been disturbingly clear, aside from the porn route. You write provocative headlines that deal with people’s regular lives and promise a big payoff from clicking through. You can also make a list of easy stuff that people want to know….

Whoo hoo, can you believe it? The price of taxi medallions is in free fall all over the United States. This represents a confirmation that the revolution in municipal cabs has already happened. Now it is just a matter of cleaning up. The Taxi and Limousine Commission of New York has been in denial about this for most of the year. But then The New York Times pushed the Commission with a series of questions. Panicked, the Commission pulled phony data from its website and finally admitted the truth: prices are down 17% already, after a huge history of nothing…

After the grand jury in the Ferguson case decided not to prosecute Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown, I tweeted: “Government declines to find government guilty.” That tweet spawned outrage. How dare I suggest that a jury of peers is actually the government? Don’t I know that government recused itself from the process, let the facts speak for themselves, and let regular citizens decide? Breaking news: Government declines to declare the government guilty. #Ferguson #FergusonVerdict #DarrenWilson — Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) November 25, 2014 After I thought about it overnight, I realized something: most people have no clue…

Marion Barry, former mayor of Washington, D.C., has died, and it causes me to recall a dinner I had with him. I was at a restaurant long after he had been tossed out of office after having been caught on camera smoking crack. Only a few months after leaving office, he was sitting at a booth with a few friends, and I decided to introduce myself. I can tell you this: this man had astounding star quality. You could never tell it from television images but in person, matters were different. He lit up the room with a kind of…

Surely there has to be a better way. That was my non-stop thought through the whole of the viewing of Mockingjay Part I, a brilliant addition to the Hunger Games series. It picks up where the last film left off. Katniss has destroyed the game arena and emerges under the protection of the rebels living deep in a bunker in District 13. She reluctantly works with the rebels and their leader President Coin to push the revolution further and rescue her beloved Peeta from captivity in the capitol city. In past films, there is the romance of revolution, the dream…

Over the last nine weeks, it’s been my privilege to conduct a series of weekly seminars on the main works of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973). I thought I knew his works very well, having put them all online and written about them individually for so many years. And yet, there is something very special about doing a compressed re-reading of the lifetime of a literary output. What I discovered had to do with the intellectual biography of an amazing thinker. His assessment of the prospects for freedom ebbed and flowed in the course of a century, as he subtly adapted…

There’s a sense these days that anyone would favor a pie over a cake, and I think I know why. Pies don’t tempt household cooks to scrimp on ingredients. That’s why pies generally taste better. If it’s apples, it’s apples, and most people don’t think a half a cup of sugar in something is “too much.” So it is for lemon and blueberry and a host of other pies made from fruit. As for the seasonal pumpkin pie, it’s just vegetables in a crust, so who is to complain? Even pecan lives in the age of the decline of dessert,…

Spiritual writers have long praised the virtue of humility, contrasting it with pride and arrogance. Humility involves the willingness to admit error, grant the reality of failure, be magnanimous in the face of success, and maintain the constant desire to keep reaching for the goal. In contrast, pride means to carry a false sense of certainty, wield the presumption of full knowledge of both the problem and the answer, and be in denial about failure when things go wrong. When you think of the market process in comparison to the legislative process, which attribute — humility or pride — would…

There is an element of absurdity in the press flurry this morning. The headlines announced how “the U.S.” and “China” had come to a “historic agreement” concerning carbon emissions and therefore climate change. The heads of state both agreed to “set targets” that are 15 years away, a time when neither are going to control anything. And whether either controls anything now is yet another question. I really do wonder if, in the entire history of preposterous displays of despotic statecraft, there has been anything so ridiculous as two men on opposite sides of the world, two men with a…

If this hasn’t happened to you, it might. You need to be prepared. You arrive at your destination and check into the hotel. You open your suitcase and discover that you forgot socks. You are going to be there for two more days. You briefly consider the possibility of wearing the same socks for three days and then realize that this would be a disaster. It’s true. There are few things more ghastly in this world than stinky feet, especially when you are on a trip. Two more possibilities present themselves. You could send your socks out to the official…

I’m very pleased that my lectures from Australia are online at last. I structured them all with a particular goal in mind. Of course I was honored to be chosen for the Australian Mises Seminar lecture series. http://youtu.be/BmR5iMGGc_c http://youtu.be/MnY_vl7Ids8 http://youtu.be/H8GFOGViRMA http://youtu.be/iGQCsB3_YbY

Democracy is a blast, no question about it. It is a thrill to imagine that we the people have control over the kind of government under which we live. That control is illustrated by our voting rituals, and people can get pretty pious and passionate about the whole thing. We talk, we debate, we wrangle, and we pronounce. What a machinery that is at work, and such expense! And then again there is reality. This reality is starting to get some public attention. The phrase “deep state” is popping up ever more in public discussions. What does it mean? It…

How far can the peer-to-peer revolution be pushed? It’s time we start to speculate, because history is moving fast. We need to dislodge from our minds our embedded sense of what’s possible. Right now, we can experience a form of commercial relationship that was unknown just a decade ago. If you need a ride in a major city, you can pull up the smartphone app for Uber or Lyft and have a car arrive in minutes. It’s amazing to users because they get their first taste of what consumer service in taxis really feels like. It’s luxury at a reasonable…

Elections are rarely what they are cracked up to be. But this year, there are good reasons to cheer — not because this party vs. that party will gain control of a legislative body. The seesawing between forms of government control strikes me as the same old. On the other hand, the roll back of the egregiously despotic war on drugs is a glorious trend to behold. In particular, the victory for legalized pot possession in D.C. is awe-inspiring. It’s a triumph for justice and reason, and a tremendous repudiation of nearly half a century of folly. The millions of…

A true lover of liberty should be suspicious of the quarantine power of government. There is a long history of abuse here, and government is not in any way qualified to pronounce on disease control much less control the population based on its judgments. Within a day or so after my article on this topic appeared, the Obama administration hired a agitprop hack to be his Ebola Czar, while the governors of New York and New Jersey instituted a mandatory quarantine for anyone returning from Africa, even if they test negative for the disease and even if there is zero…

A number of wonderful events are coming up in November need to be on your radar. The first is Libertopia in San Diego. I’ve written about this before. It’s an ingathering of mainly West Cost liberty-minded thinkers and activists. It has a free-wheeling ethos about it that is different from any you will otherwise find. The focus of the events, seminars, and speeches is not political but personal. It is about how liberty affects your life. I’m happy to be the MC of the event this year. I met so many interesting people last year, from authors to film producers…

F.A. Hayek wrote in the Constitution of Liberty that the value of information to a humane prosperity exceeds even that of physical capital. The growth of knowledge is of such special importance because, while the material resources will always remain scarce and will have to be reserved for limited purposes, the uses of new knowledge (where we do not make them artificially scarce by patents of monopoly) are unrestricted. Knowledge, once achieved, becomes gratuitously available for the benefit of all. It is through this free gift of the knowledge acquired by the experiments of some members of society that general…

In late 2008, I was talking to my friend Douglas French and drew him out on his predictions for the future. Will there will hyperinflation? A crack-up boom? A brief recession followed by restored growth? Something epic and dramatic? His answer burned into my brain because of its sheer realism. He said: “None of that. We are going to see a permanent downshift in growth, followed by confused stagnation for many years to come.” That’s the kind of answer that causes you to sort of slunk away in silence. So far, he has been proven right. I was looking at…

This is regional conference season, with liberty-minded events flourishing all over the country. It’s keeping me hopping from place to place. I’ve had a blast finding liberty in unexpected places, with participation booming in ways I never could have imagined ten years ago. This article is an attempt to account for the reasons. The change is palpable. Consider, for example, what just happened in Wichita, Kansas. For half a century, many of the old guard of libertarian thinking had worked to get a student movement going in the city, drawing from local colleges and universities. They worked it for years…

“Dracula Untold” delighted me from the first frame to the last. It is a tremendously entertaining movie that serves as a kind of prequel to the story everyone knows. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel — written as a warning to the virtue of England’s women but implausibly became the must-read salacious book of the century — only hints at Dracula’s origins. This movie provides us with a surprising background, portraying Dracula as a highly sympathetic figure, someone who willingly takes on the features of a monster in order to save his wife and child. The moral decisions he makes seem to…

It’s really come down to us vs. them. The powers that be are doing everything possible to maintain and tighten their control. Any excuse will do: crime, drugs, terrorism, recession, and now contagious disease. The result is always the same. Government takes more liberty, privacy, property, and life. Consider this Ebola business. It’s a serious matter. But our new “Ebola Czar” is a ruthless political operative. His job is messaging, not medicine. This is how it works for these people. They only think of manipulating you in order to maintain power. It’s disgusting. One solution is to give up. But…

As with every crisis in the history of the modern world, Ebola fears have given rise to debates over government power. When people are afraid, they have this irrational penchant for reaching out to government to save them. Never mind that the power might be abused or might not even be a necessary, much less suitable, power. Government is magic: if something is big, important, crucial, people long for government to do it. So it is with Ebola. We have a new Ebola Czar, operating under Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Adviser. These are the same people…

It’s finally happening: the backlash against the most impressive features of digital-age economics. I’ve been waiting for this for years, knowing that we can’t smoothly travel from the old world of command and control to the new world of personal sovereignty without engaging in the intellectual argument. What’s been missing until recently has been the framework these arguments would take. That’s now becoming clearer. The opponents of markets just can’t reconcile themselves to embracing the very thing they have supposedly advocated for generations: popular empowerment. The technological upheaval of the last decade has given rise to a wonderful restructuring of…

I’m busy reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau (yes, for the first time) and it is a wonderful book that helps you think about essentials of life. I admire the writing and the spirit of independence of his experience. I would recommend it to anyone. However, from the perspective of economics, there is a problem. Every so often he seems to stumble with regard to a crucial economic concept: the division of labor. He even puts it down by name at one point. This causes me to want to revisit the topic. It is probably the most important idea in…

My friends, let’s us celebrate the progress we have made. Only a century ago, the state served as the gatekeeper to what we could know and what we were not permitted to know. The state could control commerce and art because its nexus of production was limited to physical space and there were always central points of failure. But today, the age of censorship is over. It can be attempted but it cannot be achieved, not now and not forever more, thanks to the emergence of distributed networks and new forms of community organizing that do not dependent on geography…

It’s their party and they can do what they want. Still, it’s time to admit the incredibly obvious: Facebook as a source for community and information sharing has taken a steep dive. It’s not unintentional. The company needs revenue. But it is monetizing in ways that have seriously devalued user experience. The reality came home to me last week. I posted on a Facebook page to which I have been given access. The page has 200K likes, which is actually gigantic. If you started a page today and tried to get 200K, you would have to do something amazing and…

My visit to Disney World overwhelmed me with the incredible achievement of this private-property paradise. It only takes one visit to dismiss all the dismissiveness. Despite what you hear, it is not about decadent and superficial consumerism. It’s 43 square miles of eye-popping amazingness, making it not just the world’s most visited vacation resort but also a living testament to what commerce can achieve when the state leaves it alone. It is always developing, always innovating, always wonderful for everyone who comes to see the sights and experience the dream. And every year more than 52 million people do so….

Payment and money systems must change. But truly revolutionary change will not involve adding more third parties atop the existing system but replacing them completely with something completely new, thoroughly secure, apolitical, truly democratic, and market-based.

To understand the significance of Mises’s Socialism (1922), you have to imagine this scene from Vienna in the early 1920s. Practically every important intellectual was a socialist. There were different varieties, left and right, but they all agreed that free markets had flopped and government planning was the scientific answer. The brilliant young monetary economist Ludwig von Mises had just finished writing a book on World War I and its ghastly horrors. Why would Europe want to prolong the suffering of war? That’s what socialism would do, he realized. It would attack private property, make life impossible for business, wreck…

Sometimes a national story, reported in big venues in big ways for 48 hours, just goes away for no good reason. No lessons are learned. No insights are gained. No fundamental reforms are inspired. That is the case with the Atlanta public school scandal, in which investigators identified 178 teachers and principals in 44 of the system’s 100 schools involved in cheating on student tests. The investigation has finally been completed and some people are going to the pen. A trial will decide their fate. The response to the news was typical: Down with these lying teachers. This response taps…

It’s getting to be registration time for California’s primary point of gathering for liberty-minded people. It’s called Libertopia. It is held in San Diego. This year it runs November 13-16. You can register here. I’ve been tapped once again to be the MC of the event, which means giving a number of talks, introducing speakers, leading nightly events, and otherwise keeping things on track and making sure that everything stays smart, creative, fun, and inspiring. Libertopia is only one of what is probably a dozen of these large-scale gatherings around the country. What makes it unique? Well, there is the…

What if the state had absolutely no control over marriage? Wow, that would solve some problems. No political figure would have a stake in how to define it. All control would devolve to social institutions. The existing bitter and divisive political battles would vanish. Everything would be handled by agreement, promises, contracts, private law, and non-state institutions, same as other areas of life. Disputes would be handled through private arbitration. In a couple of weeks, I’m helping to take history in a significant step in this direction. At the conference Coins in the Kingdom, a Bitcoin event held at DisneyWorld,…

Talk to business owners about “kids these days” and you will get a wicked earful of epithets. Whatever happened to the work ethic? The answer to that question is not found in some strange corruption of the soul that has taken place in recent years, though that might be the result. The real issue has very practical roots. Young people often enter the workforce following school with no previous job experience in a commercial space. There are high costs to this reality. They lack essential formation in what it means to be truly valuable to others. You can’t learn this…

After F.A. Hayek died in 1992, a magazine commissioned me to do a final tribute to his life and work, summing up his main contributions. It was supposed to be a for a popular audience. There’s nothing like such a writing assignment to reveal how much you actually know — or do not know — about a subject. Getting into the task, I thought it was going to be a snap. I covered his biography and politics just fine, mentioned his business cycle studies, and his work on capital theory. But of course his main contribution to the world of…

Can we speak honestly about end-of-life care in America? Apparently not. In 2014, the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine hired a 21-member panel of big-named big shots, and wrote a 507-page report called “Dying in America,” to state the incredibly obvious. That obvious point is that end-of-age care in America is completely broken. You know this already if you have had a parent or grandparent enter the system and stay there until death. You also already know the scam. It’s all about extracting the last dime first from private wealth and then from the taxpayer through…

Can an institution have a heart and soul? In one sense, an institution is only as effective and meritorious as the people who run it. Still, a spirit can pervade an institution with a deep history and long-lasting commitment to high ideals. This spirit can provide guidance in hard times, added influence in good times, and generally rise above and carry its managers and employees to new heights of achievement. This thought occurred to me while sitting in the modern offices of the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. Instead of the wood floors and doors of the old…

Having completed my seminar last night on Gary Chartier’s remarkable book Conscience of an Anarchist, I have a new appreciation for the book and an intensifying confidence that this book truly is a classic. What do you expect when you pick up a book with the title Conscience of an Anarchist? Maybe you expect a fire-hot screed against the whole of the modern world — a ridged, blistering, and ideologically focused tirade. Well, if so, you are in for a great surprise. Gary Chartier has written a calm, well-reasoned, relentlessly sensible guidebook to understanding points about the world that are…

After Sept. 11, the American system of government became crazy obsessed with security. The implementation has not only been brutal and contrary to human liberty; it has completely lacked creativity. Instead of real security, we get what’s called “security theater,” and at the expense of the customer, who feels the brunt of all the new impositions. It was a dumb decision ever to nationalize airport security after Sept. 11, for doing so guaranteed this result. Security is too important to be left to government. What does the cause of security have to learn from the private sector? Plenty. Take a…

It’s easily forgotten that it all started with a multiple hijacking. To have prevented it was to have prevented a crime that’s been around since the early years of commercial airlines. It’s the problem of how to prevent a wonderful service from being used by evil people toward evil ends. As with any problem of crime, absent the mass conversation of the hearts of all of humanity, the solution is technical. What went wrong that such a solution was not in place on that fateful day? The theft of the planes on 9/11 was made possible not with grenades or…

It was my pleasure to spend a couple of days at the opening retreat designed for the incoming class of Praxis. The incoming class consists of 9 very diverse and uniquely brilliant young people. That might sound like a small incoming class but actually, observing it in real time, it seems just about right. It is small enough for individual tutoring but large enough to provide a necessary social dynamic The retreat lasts only a few days. Then they headed off to various spots around the country to embed themselves in apprenticeships with partner businesses. These are real jobs in…

Many people who have never used bitcoin look at it with confusion. Why does this magic Internet money have any value at all? It’s just some computer thing that someone made up. Consider the criticism of goldbugs, who have, for decades, pushed the idea that sound money must be backed by something real, hard, and independently valuable. Bitcoin doesn’t qualify, right? Maybe it does. Let’s take a closer look. Bitcoin first emerged as a possible competitor to national, government-managed money nearly six years ago. Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper was released October 31, 2008. The structure and language of this paper…

Have you ever had to sneak around looking for a dumpster to use? That was me this morning. I missed trash day, because the trash didn’t collect on Labor Day and the municipal service was running one day late. That it’s collected by government workers means you had better get the trash out at the right time and in the right way. If you fail to comply precisely — lid closed, wheels on curb, facing out, before 6am and not the night before, NO CLIPPINGS!! — they will just drive on. It’s not about cleaning up. It’s about compliance. Sure,…

T.K. Coleman was kind enough to type up some notes from a seminar I gave for PRAXIS, the innovative college replacement program that combines work and education. It was a pleasure to speak to the incoming class about a range of topics. I hadn’t written my talk, but this summary does suffice. Thank you T.K. for your wonderful work and spirit! Here is what he wrote based on my remarks: 1) “If you don’t love what you do, your techniques for doing it don’t matter as much. Sales isn’t just about techniques. It’s about where your heart is.” Let the…

In my last article, I made the point that the market economy rests on love: affection and friendship between people as well as the romance of living out a dream. It’s a peaceful love that depends fundamentally on human choice and the constant engagement of individual volition. Nothing happens through initiated force. The result is not a utopia — there are always privations, misfortunes, misdeeds — but the market sees all of these things as problems to solve and contains mechanisms and means to work progressively toward solutions. To more clearly see this, it’s useful to compare it with the…

The term fascism really needs reviving, not as a swear term but an actual description of an idea. This is because the idea is real, has a deep history, and taps into a political agenda very much alive in the world today. Sadly, when any word gets unpopular enough, it just becomes an epithet. It then begins to lose its substantive meaning. It’s this way with the the term racist, for example. Today it is just a term used to insult people. It’s easy to forget that racism is actually an ideology, a body of ideas that makes specific claims…

Today I took a couple of hours, in the middle of the afternoon, to be amazed and thrilled by an action-packed movie, shown in a theater built for me though I never requested it, a movie that required a production structure of thousands of people, with some of the most skilled talent in the world, all for the purposes of delighting me. Others too. What these people wanted from me was $7, in exchange for which I received an adventure experience that would have been unattainable anywhere on the planet just a few decades ago. I felt loved. It’s an…

How utterly and completely wrong we can be. Even brilliant minds with all the evidence and trend lines on their side can err. Evidence suggests that the market—that mysterious amalgam of billions of tiny decisions that comes to be instantiated in the reality around us—is infinitely smarter. In fact, the market constantly outsmarts us. I submit as evidence the gigantic multiplex cinema that recently opened in my community. It is beautiful. It is dramatic. It is gigantic. It is fashionable. It is expensive to attend. And it is crowded most nights of the week—a madhouse on weekends. When I travel…

This white-cheese stuffed olive is pure yum, but so is this clump of fresh mozzarella, not to mention this grape-leaf-wrapped rice thing. Uh oh, an employee from the store is staring right at me. Am I stealing? Am I caught? Of course I do what any rational person would do. I reach for the tub and lid and start filling it up as if to suggest: “oh I was just sampling the stuff I was buying, which means I’m a customer, not a thief, so there is no need to look down on me.” Sure, there is no sign on…

Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) was one of the most erudite and widely educated thinkers to ever grace the libertarian world. God of the Machine book is her masterwork. Its contents have not been sufficiently absorbed into the current intellectual world. It is one of those lost treasures, a book that you begin and your whole world stops. It is wise. It is prophetic. It has stood the test of time. It first appeared in 1943 as the book that went against everything that the politics of the time were telling people to believe. We had been through more than a decade…

A few years ago, a friend of mine was staying up nights playing the game Angry Birds. I tried it but I had the sense that I was behind the curve, so I declined this particular trend. Plus, it was an obsession for him and I didn’t want that. To be sure, I’m not a gamer, as you can already tell. But soon after my Angry Birds friend had become sucked into this world, I dabbled in gaming at the lowest possible levels. In fact, I became pretty serious. The game started to dominate my conversation. I played it at…

[Monday, November 24, 2014: A St. Louis County grand jury have decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The message of this decision is that if you work for the government, you can do what you want.] As incredible as it seems, the bourgeoisie seem to be turning against the police. In the wake of Ferguson, polls say that about half of us don’t trust them. Obviously, blacks remain way ahead of the curve on this, having been maltreated by the cops for many decades. But with whites catching up, we…

With the rise of the police state, the stakes are finally dawning on people. If you don’t comply, or even give the impression that you are anything less than a supplicant, you can be shot dead, right in your own community, or home, with weapons provided by the federal government and funded by you and me. It will only make the news if a community uproar follows. Otherwise, you are another statistic. Even under the best conditions, there will be no justice. Those in power will wait it out and eventually get back to building their unquestioned power backed by…

If traffic can work, society can work. This is my revelation after fighting my way through Atlanta in rush hour this morning. The level of mutual trust that is required to make it all come together is awesome to consider. Every driver controls what could either be transportation convenience or a killing machine. The prospect for deadly pileups and mass death is constant. And yet such results are actually rare. Mostly people get where they are going. Human volition is the whole key, and self interest (getting to where you want to be faster) is the universal goal. Instead of…

It’s strange how something ominously frightening — the centralized and militarized police state in the U.S. — can grow for 15 years at least and yet not enter into public debate. The upheaval in Ferguson, Missouri, has changed that. This is all to the good. It means that after the unchecked rise of the police state, the tide might finally be turning the other way. Why the new consciousness? It’s not the events themselves. Killings, riots, racial tensions, military-style crackdowns have been with us since the 1960s, and, actually, date back to the 19th century protests against the draft in…

How significant are the proposed New York State regulations on Bitcoin? Andreas Andtonopoulos says they are a serious annoyance for businesses in the U.S. that have high hopes for a better, more secure, cheaper, and more efficient method of transacting business. But in terms of the globe and the long term, they are a blip on the radar screen. History will move forward with or without U.S. regulators. Here, Andreas is interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggB0Wh_g33M

Those of us who have watched the scenes in Ferguson, Missouri, have been stunned at the brutality of the police. Most striking is their presumption that they have total control, that people are mere subjects, that all property is theirs, that they get to invent on the spot what enforcement should look like, and also that they have complete discretion over the means used to bring it about. Why do they believe these things? The reaction on the part of anyone who is subjected to this kind of treatment is human and correct: rebel. There is a movie you can…

This episode of “Let’s Talk Bitcoin” has become one of the most popular in the program’s history. It features Adam Levine, Andreas Antonopoulos, and me. We talked about big issues. It is such a pleasure to be on the show with Andreas. He amazes me, quite frankly. I could sit and listen to him talk about Bitcoin for hours. Here is the show. I had to leave early for another gig. But you get the gist. Below the video, I’ll post the transcript of Andreas’s most poignant statements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bmeohism0g Andreas M. Antonopoulos, 14:49-17:06: ‘Yeah Jeffrey, you said something that got…

When Julia Tourianski contacted me about this video, I didn’t really know what she was up to. I just played my part. But looking at the results, I’m thrilled by the content and message. Bitcoin emerged from the market and was specifically structured to live on a distributed network without a single point of failure. One of those failures that the protocol evades is the attempt by government power to control it. Government will try and try to sink its teeth into Bitcoin. That is a given. But the attempt will only drive more people into the Bitcoin ecosphere where…